Practice Management

With the growth of the Internet, and especially broadband, blogs and social media of all sorts, most newspapers are in their death throes.  The good old days of charging lawyers and others by the column inch at levels that would make big city real estate developers jealous are simply gone.  And, I say good riddance.  One of the advantages of the Third Wave is that those industries that restrict information and bilk people and companies for as much as they can get will all get their comeuppance.  Any industry or group that is described in terms of "barons", such as "newspaper barons" and "robber barons" will be leveled by cheap tech.

This is important to lawyers for a couple of reasons.  First, as a marketing tool, newspapers are ceasing to be reliable.  Ad rates are increasing for economic reasons, while readership is falling, and unless you are into something like probate you are probably no longer reaching the demographic you want.

Second, even the newly reincarnated newspapers online are just a collection of blogs.  And, this as well impacts lawyers, especially solos and small firms because it provides a cost effective way for you to compete in marketing (and in providing useful information) to your potential clients cheaply and without the barriers of a newspaper or other media channel.

But, lawyers get worried as well, especially those of us that have been at this for a while.  The first signs is that yellow pages quit working.  Now, print is following the same path.  You begin to think that you can only compete for clients by radically changing what you are doing.  And, in that, you are correct.  The good news is that with some work you can bypass the traditional media to get your marketing message out there.

According to The New York Times (online mind you), newspapers are facing their worst year every for ad revenue.  And, there are serious questions about the survival of some papers.

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago and the decline has only accelerated.  Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8% last year alone. This year, it is running about 12% below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14% to 15% decline in May. This is not being helped by the weak economy where the severe contraction of the housing markets has cut deeply into real estate ads, for example.   Executives at the Hearst Corporation say that one of their biggest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle, is losing $1 million a week.  Analysts and newspaper executives find themselves revising their forecasts downward every few months, unable to gain a stable footing on a sinking floor. Papers have cut costs by shedding thousands of workers, eliminating some distribution routes and printing fewer, smaller pages, but profit margins continue to shrink.  Analysts have issued warnings about several companies? abilities to meet their debt obligations, though the companies insist that they are at no risk of default.

The primary long-term threat to newspapers is the Internet?s siphoning away of ad revenue, a trend that has been under way for more than a decade, but one that has picked up speed in the last year. Advertisers have vastly more choices online than on paper, so newspaper Web sites win only a fraction of the advertising that goes digital, and it pays much less than advertising in print.  Online ad revenue for newspapers grew 20% to 30% annually for most of this decade. Most analysts think the industry will return to that growth rate when the economy picks up again, but for now, it is closer to 15%. The Internet still accounts for less than 10% of newspaper ad revenue.