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Stopping the Presses?
4/17/2009
What’s black and white and deep in the red?
The fact that newspaper readership is declining is hardly news. Fewer and fewer young people read newspapers. With stories breaking online 24/7, hardly anyone waits for tomorrow’s morning edition to get the news anymore. And when they want to run a classified ad, they upload it to craigslist—for free. On top of all that, the recession hit and housing went bust. According to figures released by the Newspaper Association of America, total US newspaper advertising revenues fell 16.6% in 2008, to $37.8 billion. Classified advertising, once a mainstay for local papers, fell almost 30%, with real estate classifieds falling 38%. Even newspaper online revenues dropped 1.8%—from $3.17 billion in 2007 to $3.11 billion in 2008. Apparently, unlike firms in the auto and finance industries, newspapers are not considered “too big to fail.” Newspaper mastheads from coast to coast are disappearing. For the grim litany, see the Newspaper Death Watch blog. The state of the industry has become so dire that Sen. Ben Cardin introduced legislation to grant newspapers nonprofit status (and tax breaks) to enable them to restructure. The situation is slightly better in Canada. According to figures released late last year by Veritas Communications, 5% of Canadian marketers were planning to increase their newspaper budgets in 2009 and 61% were holding the line. Of course, 32% were looking at cuts. In the same study, 39% of Canadian marketers expected to cut magazine budgets. Perhaps Mort Zuckerman had it right when he stated in a Financial Times video interview in January, “The print publishing business is an oxymoron. It is no longer a business. It is an advertising-driven business and advertisers have driven elsewhere.” For more information on the precarious state of publishing, download the eMarketer report, Consumer Magazines: Rethinking Paper and Pixels, today.
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