Newspaper Decline
Posted on June 20, 2006
Filed Under Insights |
This comes from a New York media investment firm and the negatives for newspapers are backed also by the World Editors Forum, a think tank for newspaper editors. First the banker.
“The decline of the newspaper business is a crime we’re all witnessing, though it seems few CEOs are being called to account. With few exceptions, newspaper advertising is flat or down, while circulation slides dramatically and costs continue to spike.”
That quote appears in a white paper on lead generation - or the future of online advertising. The thrust of the argument is that newspapers are now desperately looking to buy web properties or to initiate new web initiatives having underinvested in their own operations for years.
This is a December 2005 quote from the New York Review of Books. In an article by Michael Massing titled The End of News, Massing reflects on the declining audience for newspapers:
“It is a striking paradox, however, that newspapers, for all their problems, remain huge moneymakers. In 2004, the industry’s average profit margin was 20.5 percent. Some papers routinely earn in excess of 30 percent.”
In the Uk profits are less secure because of newspaper price wars. The argument though is again relevant. All these newspapers had an audience. They made two fundamental mistakes:
They believed they had an inalienable right to the audience.
They believed that a particular voice, their own, was immortal.
“Is it any surprise, then, that media buyers are slashing newspaper spending? Or that they will inevitably take an axe to TV budgets as well?” That’s the banker asking.
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