The Collapse of Print Advertising in 1 Graph

By DEREK THOMPSON - Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic

CLICK HERE: For The Atlantic Story!

Papers Facing Worst Year for Ad Revenue

Monday June 23, 11:35 pm ET By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

NY TIMES

For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies.

Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding two years ago, and as hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs, the decline has only accelerated.

On top of long-term changes in the industry, the weak economy is also hurting ad sales, especially in Florida and California, where the severe contraction of the housing markets has cut deeply into real estate ads. Executives at the Hearst Corporation say that one of their biggest papers, The San Francisco Chronicle, is losing $1 million a week.

Over all, ad revenue fell almost 8 percent last year. This year, it is running about 12 percent below that dismal performance, and company reports issued last week suggested a 14 percent to 15 percent decline in May.

“Never in my most bearish dreams six months ago did I think we’d be talking about negative 15 percent numbers against weak comps,” said Peter S. Appert, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. “I think the probability is very high that there will be a number of examples of individual newspapers and newspaper companies that fall into a loss position. And I think it’s inevitable that there will be closures in this industry, and maybe bankruptcies.”

Analysts and newspaper executives find themselves revising their forecasts downward every few months, unable to gain a stable footing on a sinking floor. Papers have cut costs by shedding thousands of workers, eliminating some distribution routes and printing fewer, smaller pages, but profit margins continue to shrink.

Since the fall, when Media General, the owner of a major newspaper chain in the South, set its 2008 budget, “We have pulled our thinking down twice with respect to revenue,” said Marshall N. Morton, the chief executive.

Over the next few years, he predicted, “There’s got to be some assimilation,” with some major American newspapers going out of business or merging. At the corporate level, he said, “I would guess that rather than bankruptcies, you’d see combinations.”

Analysts have issued warnings about several companies’ abilities to meet their debt obligations, though the companies insist that they are at no risk of default.

Most of those companies are privately held, like the Tribune Company, owner of The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and many other papers; MediaNews Group, whose papers include The Denver Post and The San Jose Mercury News; and Philadelphia Media Holdings, which publishes The Inquirer and The Daily News in that city.

Some analysts also see a lesser risk in a major publicly traded chain, the McClatchy Company, owner of The Miami Herald, The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee and others, which said last week that its ad revenue was down 15.4 percent through the first five months of the year.
The company announced plans to eliminate about 1,400 jobs, leaving it with 21 percent fewer employees than it had a year and a half ago. Some other newspaper chains had already made comparable cuts.

“It’s going a lot worse than anybody predicted, and if we have double-digit ad declines for two years, some newspapers will be in real financial jeopardy,” said Edward Atorino, an analyst at the Benchmark Company. Even with less severe losses, “You’re going to see structural changes: papers could drop a day or two per week, they could outsource printing.”

He said that he expected the decline in ad sales to slow, with 2008 producing a 10 percent drop for the year, but he cautioned that, like other analysts, he had not been pessimistic enough so far.

The primary long-term threat to newspapers is the Internet’s siphoning away of ad revenue, a trend that has been under way for more than a decade, but one that has picked up speed in the last year. Advertisers have vastly more choices online than on paper, so newspaper Web sites win only a fraction of the advertising that goes digital, and it pays much less than advertising in print.

At the same time, the Internet has drawn millions of new readers to papers, and the major ones reach far more readers than ever before.

“As long as we’ve got content, we’ve got something nobody else has,” said Mr. Morton, of Media General. The industry’s challenge, he said, is to keep expanding that audience, “proving to the advertiser that we, in fact, are the right link so that he can have his conversation with the customer through us.”

Online ad revenue for newspapers grew 20 percent to 30 percent annually for most of this decade. Most analysts think the industry will return to that growth rate when the economy picks up again, but for now, it is closer to 15 percent. The Internet still accounts for less than 10 percent of newspaper ad revenue.

Declining sales of printed papers and rising newsprint prices have also hurt the business.
The industry will not bottom out for another three or four years, analysts predict. The question, Mr. Appert of Goldman Sachs said, “is how far things will fall before then.”

REPORT: NO PAGE TURNER
BIG MAGAZINE TITLES SEE AD PAGES DWINDLE DOWN IN Q1
By KEITH J. KELLY

http://www.nypost.com/
April 15, 2008 --
Magazines that cover news, business and luxury goods were sent reeling in the first quarter of the year, while food magazines offered a few rays of light for the publishing industry, according to just released figures.

Ad pages for BusinessWeek, which just went through its third round of cuts in three years, tumbled 19.4 percent in the quarter to 429.5 ad pages while rival Forbes dipped 13.2 percent to 504.8 ad pages, according to the latest figures reported to the Publishers Information Bureau.

MORE COVERAGE
MEDIA INK: O's Success at Hearst
Fortune looked like the best of the lot, with only a 1 percent drop in the quarter to 429.4.
The newsweeklies are also taking it hard. Newsweek, which recently unveiled plans to downsize 111 people, saw ad pages drop 13.9 percent to 339.

Ad pages for Time, which also continues to prune staffers, skidded 17.8 percent to 371.
U.S News & World Report dropped even further, with its ad pages tumbling 37.5 percent to 229.46 pages.

Most industry observers tend to discount the ad-revenue figures that were just released because it uses a formula based on a one-time ad-page rate that does not account for the steep discounts that all major advertisers receive from publishers.

That is why the ad-page tally is seen as a more accurate barometer of a magazine's performance year to year.

Overall, in the quarter, the PIB said that rate card reported advertising for the period was $5.2 billion, a 1.2 percent decline from the $5.3 billion in the year ago quarter.

The ad-page tally showed a steep 6.4 percent decline.

Ellen Oppenheim, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of The Magazine Publishers of America said, "food & food products," were the bright spots.

Every Day with Rachel Ray saw ad pages soar 38.1 percent to 135.6 ad pages.
Everyday Food from the Martha Stewart empire saw ad pages up 11 percent to 120.76. Martha Stewart Living, the company's flagship tile, was up 2.6 percent in ad pages.