The non-profit SF Public Press continues to dribble out pieces online from its spring print edition on the unparalleled downsizing of Bay Area news media during the last decade. Today it’s Erica Reder’s and Justin Morrison’s look at the shrinkage—literally—of the area’s two leading newspapers, the Chronicle and the Mercury News. An excerpt:
Both papers have shrunk dramatically in the past 10 years. We took a small sample of papers — those printed over a seven-day stretch in late September — in both 2000 and 2010. On the same day in each week, a Tuesday, the Chronicle was 60 percent smaller in 2010, and the Mercury News was 66 percent smaller. That is in part due to reduced page counts, though the calculation also takes into account narrower page designs that both broadsheets adopted in the intervening decade.
On average, a weekday edition of the Chronicle had 7.4 sections in 2000. By 2010, the average dropped to 4.5 sections.
The Mercury News slimmed down from a weekday average of 8.2 sections in 2000 to 4.6 sections in 2010.
