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The State of News

Newsosaur is reporting this:

Newspaper ads tracking to $10B sales drop

"In round numbers, total newspaper advertising sales are likely to drop by $10 billion in 2009, which would put them roughly one-third lower than they were in the prior disastrous year.

Based on the 29.0% skid in advertising sales in the second quarter of this year that was reported on Friday, consolidated print and online ad sales likely will be no better than $27 billion this year. They could even be worse, depending on the state of the economy.

The projected performance compares to total ad revenues of $37.8 billion in 2008, when sales plunged by 16.6%, which until now had been the worst decline on record."

Read the entire post here.

I have fond memories in the early 80's when online pricing was being disputed by librarians. I attended several public forums where librarians publicly demanded that the only price should be 25 cents (the same as for the print paper - ah those were the days - and they didn't want to see any ads! I hope and pray that our understanding of business models has improved . . .? ). The fulltext newspapers online defended their pricing but still basically only captured the top research libraries. Then along came the web and newspaper websites. And the attendant ads but they were "free" so it was 'acceptable'. Unfortunately most of the ad and other revenue wasn't going to the newspapers but to the search engines (like big G) or new services like Monster, Craigslist and eBay. That's not good and doesn't replace revenue streams.

So what are we going to see next? Rumours abound that most newspaper websites are going to become walled gardens and fee based. We'll see. Can everyone be a WSJ?

This shift is very important for libraries who need the news.

Does your library or research interests of your organization depend on news?

If choice and voice decline, what are your strategies for getting the complete picture?

On another note, and in the tag marked we should note this link:

Newspapers Fire Young People Most

"Common sense would suggest that during this whole "death of print" era, newspapers would desperately cling to their young, idealistic and Internet-savvy employees who are willing to work for low entry-level wages.

But no."

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on September 03, 2009 (boomark / email).