MediaPost Publications – Age, Income of Magazine Readers Edge Up – 10/31/2007 Annotated

Online, Newspaper Audiences Up, But Revenue Growth Slows – MediaPost, Nov. 1, 2007 Annotated

Don’t count newspapers out yet – CNN Money, Oct. 22, 2007 Annotated

‘Newsweek’ Gets New Execs, New Look – MediaPost, Oct. 31, 2007 Annotated

Dark day at the BBC as staff learn their fate – The Independent, Oct. 18, 2007

Big Weeklies Sputter, Smaller Pubs Soar – MediaPost, Sept. 04, 2007

[It’s not a good time to be a broad, general-purpose magazine. Time and Newsweek circulation is trending steadily down, while U.S. News’ numbers are falling precipitously. Meanwhile, Europe’s The Economist and The Week are growing nicely.

What’s strange about all this is that both of the European magazines publish longish, weighty and thoughtful articles. Since the USAToday-ization of the media began in 1984, conventional wisdom has been that the only way to keep readers was to lighten, shorten, colorize and sap editorial content of as much depth as possible. Now it appears that growth is shifting to publications with some gravity. Maybe we’re beginning to lose our appetite for cartoon infographics? – Ed.]

Morgan Stanley Sells Entire New York Times Stake – Bloomberg, Oct. 17, 2007

Recent downsizing initiatives in newspaper land:

• St. Louis Post-Dispatch offers 60 buyouts – Employees must be at least 50 with 10 years of service. The move is expected to save up to $4.4 million a year, or $73,000 per employee.
• The Baltimore News-American will lay off an undisclosed number of employees, citing the sluggish economy in the area.
• The Daily Herald, third largest newspaper in Illinois, will lay off about 40 employees. Surprisingly, circulation has been flat at the paper, compared to the overall pattern of declines throughout the U.S.
• The St. Paul Pioneer Press said 15 employees will take buyouts, including 10 newsroom staff members. The paper is hoping to eliminate 30 positions in all.
• Media News Group of Denver said it’ll cut back on staffing at some of its Northern California papers. The publisher hopes to eliminate jobs through attrition, but said layoffs can’t be ruled out.
• The Tennessean offered voluntary buyouts to 15 staffers. The paper has already frozen hiring and cut issue sizes by about six pages.

Media-watchers have found some reasons to be optimistic recently:

• Deutsche Bank thinks the alliance between 17 newspapers companies and Yahoo could stanch the industry’s bleeding much faster than expected, reports Editor & Publisher. Analysts think that the revenue from Yahoo’s HotJobs recruitment site, in particular, could add 20% to newspapers’ online revenue growth by the second half of 2008. Taken together, the online boost from the Yahoo alliance could pull newspapers out of their slide and turn them toward revenue growth by 2009, the authors say.

The forecast is positively giddy, given that few facts and figures have been released since the alliance was announced last November. It also seems optimistic in light of signs of a coming economic slowdown and softness in recruitment advertising. One odd note is the study’s description of the display advertising business as growing “gang-busters.” In fact, the most recent Interactive Advertising Bureau data actually sees a decline in display ads as a percentage of overall online advertising. While the overall display market is growing, it’s a stretch to characterize it as being on a tear.

• Ad spending on newspaper websites increased 19.3% in the second quarter, according to a Newspaper Association of America survey cited in MediaPost. Of course, the decline in print advertising revenue for the quarter exceeded the total online revenue of the newspapers cited in the study. But it’s nice to see the growth trend continue.

• E&P asks, plaintively, “Is Ad Revenue Stabilizing?” That’s because Wachovia Equity Research reported that newspapers suffered only a 7.2% decline in ad sales in July, which is less than the 7.5% and 8.1% drop-offs reported in May and June. While the news is heartening, it’s probably best to wait for a few more months’ worth of data before forecasting a soft landing.

• Writing for the Seattle Times, John Harner visits a couple of veteran journalists and turns up all the stereotypes about bloggers. It will be a step forward when journalists stop dismissing bloggers as just a bunch of undisciplined vermin and start working with this democratic medium to make it better.
• MediaPost cites the unusually dire language financial firms use in recent forecasts for the newspaper industry. Moody’s lowered its outlook for the New York Times Co. to a rare “negative” rating. Fitch Ratings noted that at least half the recent declines in revenue are due to “secular” rather than “cyclical” factors. That means that money ain’t coming back. Fitch then piles on by forecasting that newspapers’ online revenue will be under continuous pressure from the large number of alternative venues that advertisers have there.
• Maybe the salvation of print is scratch-n-sniff advertising, which is being tried out by the LA Times, according to Forbes. At least that’s one idea that can’t be duplicated online. Or can it? Back in the dot-com bubble, a startup called DigiScents invented a product that could transmit smells over the Internet. A company called TriScenx is still pushing the concept. It takes all kinds.

Three recent items of note:

MediaPost reports that newspapers have a surprising new competitor in eBay. The auctioneer’s new classified advertising service, which facilitates transactions between people who live near each other, is a potentially powerful force in classified advertising, which is newspapers’ most profitable business. The article goes on to suggest that newspapers should partner with eBay, which is kind of like thanking your host for the glass of poison he’s just offered you.

The VP of Marketing at Eluma makes a case for news organizations to get local again. In an iMediaConnection opinion piece that’s otherwise a shameless pitch for his company’s products, Joe Lichtenberg cites a B&C/Magid Media Labs study of 2,000 Internet users that found that only 13% use the Web for local news. However, 60% said they’d be likely to use a local TV site for topics that include health, real estate, in-depth sports and local events. Yes, it’s all about local. Years ago, a lot of papers got New York Times-envy and decided to expand their international coverage. They’re paying for that now. The few newspapers that survive the coming nuclear winter will be those that refocus aggressively on local issues and leave White House press conferences to the AP.

Editor & Publisher, whose coverage of the meltdown of its core market has been largely uninspiring, does come through with a provocative argument by Steve Outing that newspapers should get over their obsession with objectivity. Harking back to the finest days of muckraking, Outing argues that the media’s efforts to tell both sides of the global warming issue is as dumb as telling both sides of the polygamy issue. The fact that some whackos still believe global warming is just a cyclical atmospheric change is no reason to give them equal time. Newspapers should advocate for their readers to get active and do something, Outing says. It’s interesting advice. In the new world in which everyone is an opinion writer, not having an opinion may make newspapers look clueless.

From MediaPost: “Some of the nation’s largest newspaper publishers reported their July revenue on Monday, and the news isn’t good. The third quarter is shaping up to be as bad as the second…[at McClatchy,] classifieds, …dropped 15.3%, and national revenue…tumbled 19%. Real-estate classifieds suffered the biggest percentage drop, plunging 26%.

“[Gannett said] newspaper revenue slid 6.1% to $408.2 million, due mostly to the 8.3% decline in classifieds and the 9.1% drop in national ad revenue. In terms of its individual properties, the most alarming results came from USA Today, where total ad revenue slid 15.9%.

“[Lee Enterprises said that among ad revenue declines,] automotive was down 17.4%, employment 13.6%, and real estate 13.2%.”

The New York Times is ready to shut down Times Select, its subscription service that hosts its premier columnists behind a paid firewall, according to the New York Post. The service has signed up 221,000 subscribers and the numbers are dropping, the paper reports.

Media Post says Times columnists were grumbling, too. They felt that the lost readership didn’t make up for the relatively paltry revenue. An Alexa traffic graph indicates that nytimes.com traffic has been dropping steadily, although not dramatically, over the last year.

If the Times ends Times Select, it will be a blow to whatever hope there is for a paid Web content model for newspapers. At this point, The Wall Street Journal stands alone among daily papers, although quite a few specialized publications charge for content or require visitors to subscribe in print.

Publishers continue to find bright spots in otherwise dismal news. Quoting MediaPost:

“The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, flagship paper of Journal Communications, enjoyed an online revenue boom of 46.9%, ending the quarter at $3.4 million. And Mary Junck, chairman and CEO of Lee, noted that ‘our rapid online growth has accelerated to a rate of more than 60% in the last quarter and now accounts for almost 8% of our advertising revenue, surpassing national.'”

That’s good news. However, overall revenues were off $8.5 million in the quarter, or about two-and-a-half times the total of all online business. As bright as the future appears for the online arms of daily newspapers, the rapidity of the decline in print advertising still points to painful cost-cutting if these businesses are going to survive.

Google will sell AdWords placements in 225 newspapers. There’s an irony in this announcement. A few years ago, newspapers gave away online classifieds to its print customers. Now they run print ads from online ad sellers at a steep discount.