From today’s Wall Street Journal:
- 1. Print-ad revenue suffered biggest decline since “at least 1950″ in 2007.
2. Classified ads, third of total, was down almost 17% last year.
3. Gannett Co. saw an 8.3% fall in same-newspaper ad revenue compared to Feb. of 2007.
4. McClatchy’s ad revenue fell 13% in Feb.
5. Media General reported a near 18% drop in publishing-ad revenue for Feb.
6. New York Times was down 6.6% for the month.
7. Tribune Co. “is seeing ‘accelerating declines’ in publishing revenue this year.
Gordon Borrell of Borrell Associates says, “We have no evidence to show that the bottom has been reached yet.” No kidding.
Popularity: 5% [?]
March 31st, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Perhaps the newspapers should spend more time reporting on the “subprint” rather than the “subprime” scandals. Incredible how these goliaths refused to understand that they were in the news delivery business, not the print newspaper business. Are they like ostriches with their heads stuck in the sand or dinosaurs which are huge, lumbering, and headed for extinction? My guess is that they’re trying their hardest to fit into both groups.
March 31st, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Good counterpoint here:
http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/03/of-fly-eyes-and.html
On that blog, there’s a chart:
But when you see this chart, what’s the first thing that you notice? Surprisingly, the industry is just ten percent off its historic highs (much like the stock market) and is still twice as big as it was twenty years ago.
April 3rd, 2008 at 10:42 am
This is both sad and exciting to me. Sad because I can remember my father getting the paper and me excitedly pulling out the funny papers (which I now get delivered in my email), but exciting because we’ve opened up an entirely new channel for receiving information.
It does make me wonder if twenty years from now my kids will be absorbing their news through some other technological contrivance and nostalgically remembering when they read Dilbert on Dad’s laptop…