Compared to the first quarter of 2008, advertising spending is down 12 percent, according to Nielsen. That’s a decrease of $3.8 billion, the company reported today. Local newspapers are down 14.3 percent, according to the company’s findings.
Editor & Publisher’s Fitz & Jen are reporting on a report from Moody’s Investors Service that takes newspapers to task over their cost structures. The report notes that 70 percent of newspaper costs are tied up in printing — not the best cost structure in the online era.
Ann Handley has an great how-to about using journalistic writing skills on Twitter. “… news journalism works best when it’s simple and direct, at least in the story’s lead sentences. And simplicity (and other tenets of good journalism — like brevity, and clarity, and immediacy) are now cornerstones of how many businesses, brands and individuals communicate on Twitter,” she writes.
Statistics just posted on the NAA website show that print ad sales were down 27.9 percent in the first quarter of this year. Online sales fell 13.4 percent.
But the worse news was what happened to classifieds, where sales fell an astounding 42.3 percent.
Newspaper ad sales for last year were off by 16.6 percent, which the NAA said was the worse 12 months in the recorded history of the industry.
This story from American Journalism Review shows how some have a desire for news about the communities they live in that can’t be met by most metro news organizations. “Larger dailies, which are closing down and/or going to online versions, will not cover the news, community events and announcements of small towns,” the paper’s editor says. “We have to do it ourselves. It is the only way we’ll stay informed and connected. Whether it is in print or online, community journalism is still of value.”
The NAA reported this week that the Dallas Morning News’ high school sports Website, HS GameTime, now averages nearly 2 million pageviews a month. Visit the site and look at it as a treasure trove of ideas for what you could be doing for the high schools in your readership area. Football season is just around the corner, and now is a great time to tool up a Website that can draw all kinds of fan interest – and advertising dollars. GameTime generates so much traffic because it offers what no newspaper has the news hole to do – stats, scores and schedules, standings, rankings, videos, slide shows, and the like. Plus, they let readers submit photos and videos of their teams. To that, you should add videos of your band at halftime, cheerleaders doing their routines, and photos and videos of what’s happening in the stands and on the bench during the games – all the off-action stuff that we never have room for in the paper but people love to see.
Who’s the audience for this type of coverage? Athletes and their parents, band members and their parents, cheerleaders and their parents, other family and friends, local sports fans, high school kids who’d never even think of picking up your paper, and so on. Build this site, and they will come. And when they come, advertisers will, too.
Rafe Needleman’s piece on Google’s business practices it quite interesting. He dissects the many industries Google has touched, and shows that journalism isn’t the only industry that has had the rug pulled out from under it by the Internet. On Needleman’s list: journalism (of course), telecommunications, computer operating systems, e-mail and advertising.
Do you know which newspaper has the largest circulation in the world? Or which one actually has its own theme song? Or how many use the Gothic font in their masthead? If you’re curious, check out this blog post Mark Luckie compiled, “9 things you didn’t know about newspapers.”
News executives around the country are talking more and more about a perceived need to charge for online news, but those that are trying to monetize journalism on the Internet are finding it’s not as simple as it seems.
Newspapers who are curious about why their classified revenues are down need look no further than this study: According to Pew research, online classified use is growing significantly. The number of online adults to use classified ads websites, such as Craigslist, has more than doubled since 2005. Online classified use has more than doubled in the past four years. Almost half (49 percent) of Internet users say they have ever used online classified sites, compared with 22 percent of online adults who had done so in 2005. On any given day about a tenth of internet users (9 percent) visit online classified sites, up from 4 percent in 2005.