Is the newspaper advertising slump about to end? Nope. But it’s continuing to get a little bit less awful.
A survey of some of the remaining analysts covering the industry, as well as people who actually work in it, concludes that Q3 ad revenue will be down 25 percent. Awful by any standard except those of this year: Q1 was down 28.3 percent and Q2 was 29 percent.
Daylife, a news aggregator that launched a few years ago with a good deal of hype but has since retreated to the back pages, has landed another investor: Getty Images has bet $4 million on the company, which has raised some $12 million to date.
Be very careful about reading too much into this. But for what it’s worth, several newspaper publishers are now announcing that things are looking…“up” is the wrong word. Let’s try “less bad.” And let’s see what the New York Times has to say tomorrow.
So what exactly were the 24 newspaper publishers who gathered in suburban Chicago yesterday talking about? We don’t know, because the meeting was held off the record and participants like the New York Times, Gannett and Hearst aren’t talking about it. Except we do know, sort of.
Let’s get this out of the way in advance: When Google delivers its first-quarter report card today, it will likely mark the first time the search giant sees revenue decline from one quarter to the next. So that’s a big deal. But it has also been expected for some time now. So what should you be looking for this afternoon?
Yesterday we got a sense of how bad the first quarter was for the magazine business. Today we get a report card from the newspaper industry, and it’s equally grim. Gannett saw more than a third of its publishing ad revenue disappear in the first three months of 2009.
Media giant Zenith Optimedia says the ad market is in worse shape than it had previously suspected. This is what Zenith Optimedia, along with just about every other ad forecaster, has been saying every three months or so for the past year. So it’s hard to get worked up about this stuff. The upside is also old news: Online advertising is doing better than traditional ads.
This is what passes for good news in the newspaper business these days: Someone bought some shares of one of the industry’s biggest companies. Alas, even that story is old news. And the headlines coming out of Gannett later this week won’t be pleasant either.
The New York Times is already trying to mortgage its headquarters and unload assets like its stake in the Boston Red Sox. So, what’s left to sell? The front page. CBS has taken out the first display ad the paper has ever allowed on the front of its print edition. This is only historic because the Times management has been so stubborn about keeping its front page pristine–it’s hard to imagine that any reader will care. Of course, the cash-crunched media company really doesn’t have any choice at this point.
What happens when a large company full of reporters fires hundreds of its workers? They report on their own firings. That’s what’s happening at Gannett Blog, where former Gannett employee Jim Hopkins is asking other former Gannett employees to share the details of their layoffs. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them to talk about–Hopkins, via a network of Gannett tipsters, has tallied up about 1,000 cuts just in this round alone.
Peter Kafka has been covering media and technology since 1997, when he joined the staff of Forbes magazine. Most recently, he has been the managing editor of the tech and media Web site, Silicon Alley Insider. Read more »
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