Patterico's Pontifications

3/29/2008

Hard Times for Newspapers

Filed under: Miscellaneous — DRJ @ 4:51 pm



[Guest post by DRJ]

No wonder newspapers report the economy is in dire shape. It’s dire for them:

“The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.

According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 — the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.”

However, online ad revenue showed gains of 31.4% in 2005, 31.4% in 2006, and 18.8% in 2007. Online revenue “now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenue in 2007 compared to 5.7% in 2006.”

— DRJ

14 Responses to “Hard Times for Newspapers”

  1. Biased product drives away readers so circulation down

    Lower circulation result in lower ad prices

    Papers bash economy companies advertise less consumers spend less

    Even in a booming economy their revenue stream was going downhill. What do they expect in a less robust economic situation they are over hyping.

    SlimGuy (ea6549)

  2. I’ve wondered about that for a long time. Even when the economy was booming, you’d get all kinds of pessimistic press reports about being in a recession, or having a recession being imminent, or how severe the recession was.

    Some of that was probably Democratic-press horn tooting, to try to make voters upset. But I do wonder how much of that was the press seeing their own sector’s economic situation getting increasingly dire, and assuming that everyone else must be suffering too.

    Press decline is due to obsolescence, of course, not to overall economic decline. But they are only now just beginning to understand that their era is over and won’t be coming back. There isn’t anything a physical newspaper can do that a web site can’t do better — except line bird cages and start fires in fireplaces. And wrap fish.

    Steven Den Beste (99cfa1)

  3. I agree. Thanks for saying it much better than I could.

    DRJ (a431ca)

  4. The USA Today is still running the scam where papers are delivered to your hotel door. After one particularly loathsome cartoon “HitlerBush Cheney skipping through mounds of skulls” I asked I no longer be foisted this dead tree product. I checked and I’m not paying for it but I’ll bet it counts in their circulation figures. POS

    red (9e9332)

  5. It breaks my heart to read news like this.

    Daryl Herbert (4ecd4c)

  6. Press decline is due to obsolescence, of course, not to overall economic decline. But they are only now just beginning to understand that their era is over and won’t be coming back. There isn’t anything a physical newspaper can do that a web site can’t do better — except line bird cages and start fires in fireplaces. And wrap fish.

    Comment by Steven Den Beste — 3/29/2008 @ 6:10 pm

    You forgot its use as a dog trainer too Steven. 😛

    Seriously the dead tree news has 4 things that are killing them as far as circulation goes.

    1) monolithic adherence to liberal dogmas which has the effect of alienating close to 50% of the population. Many of which have dropped subscriptions.

    2) Ineffecient delivery systems which struggle to deliver a paper on time, dry and near the door. The older system of kids on bicycles had the advantage of getting the paper close to the door, but now most routes are delivered from cars, and have too many papers to be delivered in the time alloted. Many subscribers found their papers either late, or into the grass where it gets wet.

    3) aging subscribers who are not being replaced by the younger generations. Kids today do not find reading as exciting, and most are happy to get their news from the internet, further reducing circulation.

    4) too many ads in the papers. which has driven away a lot of readers. They don’t mind a few ads, but it got to the point where paper has more ads than news because greedy newspaper publishers wanted too much revenue and didn’t worry about the long term effects of having so many ads. It diminished the value of each ad and eventually drove away subscribers.

    mvargus (a7c1ca)

  7. Kind of ironic that these masters-of-universe lecture us about health care, retirement, housing and many other economic issues when their industry is imploding.

    Perfect Sense (b6ec8c)

  8. I don’t get it. The “it” being internet advertising. I have NEVER clicked through, the pop ups (or new slide ins or unwanted TV ads) just anger me as no newspaper ad ever has, I pay no attention whatsoever to the ads on the sides of blog pages etc. Maybe internet ads are cheap but cheap doesn’t mean effective. Racking my mind right now I cannot tell you the name of a single product I have seen on the web today. The web DOES give those ad agency fakes something else useless to do and charge companies money for their “expertise.”

    Howard Veit (cc8b85)

  9. I am shocked that SDB forgot our host’s preferred use of his favorite paper!

    Another Drew (8018ee)

  10. I remember as a little boy, that you could get a telephone installed in your house in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. The rotary dial was sluggish and sometimes dialing was clumsy and frustrating. Getting a proper connection on the first attempt to dial, was a crapshoot.

    Sluggish, clumsy, predictable, inflexible and unreliable in a free market society…will drive consumers away in droves.

    Only in governmentally overcontrolled situations will the ecologically unsound and economically unwise model persist.

    By the time the newspaper lands in the puddle on your curb, it is already untimely for most consumers with computers and the Internet, blogs, radio, tv and cell phones. The only thing that they are able to add, is objectively expanding a reader’s dimension and perspective…the one area in which they make little effort.

    Today’s modern tree killers are not interested in the readers’ expansion of knowledge and perspective, they are interested in screeching smug and pedantic polemics and party line indoctrination.

    As our information stream continues to be corrupted and the tree killers continue slouching toward Pravda, they suffer the necrosis of stale ideas and irrelevancy.

    In a circumstance of bad karma coming back to swallow them in their own poison, the one note screeching falls on deaf ears across the spectrum. Their zombie choir needs an outlet to shout back. Kos is a better vehicle for the eye bulging, spittle-flecked rage of the leftist lemmings. The bulge and spittle crowd can’t scream and chant echo chamber slogans at a mess of dripping pulp and the blurry, running, finger-staining, black ink.

    So, the market dwindles as the tree killer twiddles.

    It is little wonder that they have lost their moral compass as the dense fog of irrelevancy and insignificance creeps ever closer to their shores.

    It is little wonder that they now must fake photographs, forge documents, fabricate stories out of whole cloth, make backdoor deals with criminals and cretins. The MetaStasisMedia is dying, being eaten away from the inside. They scoffed at others, saying they were sitting around in their pajamas.

    But the loss of their morality, the death of their objectivity, the decay of their ethics…left them all dressed up with no place to go.

    I don’t miss the rotary phone and I won’t miss the tree killers. They are inefficient and antique relics, rendered useless by the passage of time.

    cfbleachers (4040c7)

  11. After years of lies,half truths,bias and other the liberal news rags are suffering for their fruad too bad to all those papers the birds dont want it on the bottom of their cages anymore

    krazy kagu (6c9901)

  12. Agree with all re obsolete. But I do enjoy the ritual of reading a paper. On the couch, in the park… in a hotel lobby, a bagel shop or at the airport. Not a huge fan of LAT, but to travel and sample big city papers… really enjoy that. And I always make it a habit to stay at places that deliver Financial Times to the door, never USA Today. Pretty much the only paper I won’t read. (I also like seeing local ads, which tell a lot about a town.) I always have a couple coins for the vending machine.

    Vermont Neighbor (e7ed47)

  13. Want a good laugh? Check out this 1981 TV report about pre-HTML online newspapers from KRON-TV San Francisco. The last part is hilarious.

    BTW – at the time, KRON was owned by the publishers of the San Francisco Chronicle.

    L.N. Smithee (28bb98)

  14. That KRON clip is classic. The news team sounds so breezy and cheerful, like it’s just another throw away story.

    Vermont Neighbor (e7ed47)


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