Papers Facing Worst Year For Ad Revenue

by Richard Perez-Pena - June 23rd, 2008 - New York 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.

The reasons are not unsurprising. Two huge forces are weakening newspapers.

The first is the supremacy of the Internet to provide many of the services that have long fueled newspaper revenue. Coupons can be provided over the Internet at a fraction of the cost of printing coupons in millions of newspapers that will never be clipped. The search capability of the Internet means that job ads can be significantly more effective than in newspapers. Auto ads are much easier to find on the Internet for the same reason. As for real estate ads, the vastly greater ability of the Internet to allow great pictures, with thumbnails to make it easy to read and scan many ads, backed by larger pictures for detail, means that newspapers just cannot be competitive.

The second is the anti-Americanism of newsroom and editorial boards. Polls have repeatedly shown that newspaper writers are significantly more liberal than the populace they serve. So much so that there are more Marxists who cheer the destruction of America and free enterprise working on newspapers than there are conservatives, even though conservatives make up the largest single portion of American people while Marxists in the populace are in single digits. Even moderates are underrepresented on newspapers. The percentage of moderates in the populace is 4 times the percentage of moderates working on newspapers. Even freedom of speech is at risk as newspapers have stopped allowing ads they see as politically incorrect and letters to the editor are appallingly edited to make conservatives look out of touch. The result is that a significant majority of Americans have discovered that they can get more honest and less biased news and opinion on the Internet, and have stopped buying papers as a result.

These two trends will continue. Newspapers seem unable to figure out how to compete with the Internet advantages in their traditional ad revenue streams. And they seem unwilling to reverse the bias and bigotry in their philosophical barrier with the populace they serve. Holding the views of your customer in contempt is not the way to increase sales, or even maintain them as this article is pointing out.

There will always be a niche for newspapers, just as there is still radio after TV. However the newspaper of the future will be much smaller than in the past and many fewer will be sold. The industry has not yet come up with a vision of how to compete in the online world of the 21st century in a nation that is the world's bastion of free enterprise and liberty when their product is produced by socialists and marxists.