We saw a mini-rally in newspaper shares yesterday, based on the notion that the worst may be over for the industry. But the New York Times’s Q2 results are pretty inconclusive:
The publisher was able to take a big chunk out of costs, but revenue kept plunging, and Web ads dropped by more than 15 percent. The paper did say, though, that things got less bad as the quarter progressed, and that they’ll get slightly less bad next quarter, too.

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When will the online ad market finally start bouncing back? We’ve yet to see it in Q2 earnings reports from the likes of Google and Yahoo.

But one observer says it’s already here: Ad optimization firm PubMatic reports that prices for ad-network inventory it sees have increased 35 percent since the beginning of the year.

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We’ve seen multiple studies showing a boost for Microsoft’s search share since it launched Bing a month ago, and now comScore weighs in and says the same thing. ComScore is the market mover when it comes to this stuff, so it will be interesting to see how Wall Street digests the news. My gut: Not a needle mover.

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JP Morgan has good news for Microsoft: Its massive ad campaign for Bing is working just fine. The bad news for Microsoft: For most people, Google is already working just fine.

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Are you one of those Facebook users who worries that your boss will see photos of what you did last weekend? Then you’ll like Facebook’s new privacy policy. But if you’re part of the large group of people who think that nothing is really private on the Web and that everyone should see everything you do online, then you’re really going to like Facebook’s new privacy policy.

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If this keeps up, I may have to modify my trustworthy “TV ads can’t buy you search share” axiom. Apparently, Microsoft’s gazillion-dollar campaign for Bing is working, at least in the short term: comScore says Microsoft continues to grab search share from Google.

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First quick look at Apple’s earnings: Tim Cook and company have beaten the Street’s expectations. Apple earned $1.33 per share on revenues of $8.16 billion, beating the consensus of $1.09 and $8 billion. It also outperformed estimates for sales of the Mac, iPod and iPhone. At first glance, a strong quarter. But guidance for the next quarter may be a bit less than what Wall Street was looking for.

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Yesterday the New York Times won five Pulitzer Prizes and executive editor Bill Keller took a well-deserved victory lap with a speech that reportedly had his newsroom in tears. But for better or worse, none of that matters to investors, who are trying to figure out what the company’s long-term prospects look like. In the near term, they look terrible.
In the first three months of this year, the company saw ad sales drop 27 percent, and the Internet no longer helps: Web ad sales were down 6.1 percent. The company says to expect more of the same, for a while.

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As predicted, Google saw its revenue decline from the last quarter of 2008 to the first three months of this year. The search giant said it generated net revenue of $4.07 billion, which is down from the 4.22 billion Google notched in the previous quarter, and it’s a tad shy of the $4.08 billion consensus. But investors are going to be pleased with the non-GAAP earnings number: $5.16 share, up from $5.10 per share in the previous quarter and way, way above the $4.90 per share consensus. Bottom line: Google has cut back on its expenditures and that’s boosted profits.

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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.

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Time Warner shareholders used to complain that the stock was stuck in the high teens. These days, those prices seem pretty good. But how to get there?

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