A Nov. 17 letter from PNJ advertising director Bobby Rice touts his paper has “more than 236,000 adult readers every Monday through Friday,†which is an average of 47,200 per day. It also brags of more than 259,000 readers over four Sundays, which is another way of saying 64,750 every Sunday.
What’s funny is that they used these expanded numbers to “prove†they reach 77 percent of the adults in this market. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Pensacola Metropolitan Statistical Area in 2004 estimated the adult population to be 306,976.
This means the 47,200 readers actually equates to 15 percent of area adults reading on any given weekday and the 64,750 Sunday readers equaling 21 percent.
For Rice’s statement of the 77 percent market penetration to be true an entirely different group of adults would have to read the daily paper every day.