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Press Mentions

  • Ad Age/Nat Ives: It's Back: 25 MORE Media People You Should Follow on Twitter
    25 media types worth following on Twitter.
  • Ad Age: Why So Many Media Companies Stumble Globally
    The few news brands that have succeeded, to greater or lesser degrees, arguably include CNN, Bloomberg, People, Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times and The Economist. Other contenders are the Associated Press, the BBC, ABC, NBC, maybe CBS, National Public Radio, News Corp. and the top U.K. dailies, said Ken Doctor, the newspaper veteran who's now an analyst at Outsell. "If a news-media organization sees itself as covering the wider world, sees it as its foundation, that in and of itself differentiates it from all the local media -- newspapers, TV, radio -- out there," he said. "If, in addition, it has substantial reporting and editing resources, then it can play. The tough part is the part we're in: Who wins the race to ubiquity and can make it pay off?"
  • NYT: If The Globe Were Sold, What Price?
    “The best guesstimate of the real price: a buck. The best of an announced price: between $50 and $100 million,” he wrote in an e-mail message. The devil will be in the details of the obligations that a buyer would assume, he said, adding that “a buck essentially represents a gentleman’s agreement: I take a liability, headache and a distraction off your hands.” He said that the Times Company could hang on to some pension liabilities or other obligations in exchange for a higher purchase price, a number that would give the appearance that it was getting something for the more than $1 billion it paid 16 years ago. He added that no bank would be interested in financing a deal given how other deals have blown up, so “the owner’s own money is immediately at risk.”
  • Economist: It isn’t just newspapers: much of the established news industry is being blown away. Yet news is thriving
    Ken Doctor of Outsell, a research firm, reckons that the Kindle appeals to baby-boomers who would otherwise read a paper magazine or newspaper. The young prefer their iPhones and their aggregators. Indeed, the top four magazines on Kindle, according to Amazon’s website, are the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time and Reader’s Digest. Not much of a youth market there.
  • Forbes: San Diego News Shoot-Out
    "The Union-Tribune is cratering. That opens a hole in the market and the opportunity for some unconventional business models."
  • BizTimes.com: Journal Sentinel faces daunting choices
    “There’s no strategy – this is panic. What we’re likely to see this year (around the country) and what we’ll see in Milwaukee too is (publishers asking) how much they need to cut back and how much they can do to still hold their place in the market. For publishers, it’s about ‘How do we stay alive and stay profitable until we can get to some sort of breathing period?’ (Economic) recovery will not bring back their old business, but it will give them some breathing room.”
  • AP: Threat to shut Boston Globe shows no paper is saf
    The threat to close the paper "sends a very clear message to all employees and unions of surviving newspapers — that this is not business as usual. This is uncharted territory....Newspapers all "have a sword over their heads," said Doctor. If the industry wants to survive, he said, "everyone has to give some blood."
  • Guardian: Seattle mourns the last day of its venerable Post Intelligencer
    "There's a lot less reporting happening, on a national scale. For the 1,500 or so daily newspapers, it's just a matter of getting smaller and smaller."
  • Seattle Times: Seattle's oldest newspaper goes to press for the final time
    "They're bringing the full force of their national relationships and content to bear on Seattle. They [Hearst] could sustain this experiment indefinitely. If it makes a million or loses a million, that's nothing to a company like Hearst."
  • AP: Hearst hopes Web-only Seattle P-I will turn profit
    "It [online-only PI] definitely can make money. They have a head start in terms of the brand and (Web) traffic. They have to run like hell to create a new identity."

What's On My Netvibes

  • Steve Goldstein
    Fellow KR alumnus Steve Goldstein understands the research/info needs of end-use enterprise customers, and he's built a company that is helping satisfy them.
  • Peter Krasilovsky
    Centered on e-commerce of all kinds from Yellow Pages through classifieds and new ad models.
  • Mark Potts
    Mark Potts is an experienced journalist, observer of Internet journalism and an alumnus of the Backfence experiment.
  • John Blossom
    Thoughtful views on a wide-ranging mix of media change.
  • Jay Rosen
    Jay Rosen is a provocateur in the best sense, an NYU journalism professor deeply committed to keeping the press accountable and vibrant in the digital age.
  • David Meerman Scott
    David Scott understands web marketing of digital content. Check out his site and his new book, "Cashing In With Content"

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November 05, 2007

Nine Questions on How The Latest Circ Decline Will Drive Market Moves

Today's FAS-FAX report is numbing in its lack of revelation. The newspaper industry's circulation swoon continues, and at a pace that hasn't changed much over the last three years.

Daily: Down 2.5%
Sunday: Down 3.5%

So nine questions on how today's numbers will drive the next set of market moves:

1) Last year, newspaper publishers said they were ending junk (freebies+) circulation that advertisers really didn't want and that those terminations were largely responsible for the 2%+ decline in circulation. They said 2007 would be better. Now who believes them that 2008 is the year that those cuts will have cycled through?

2) The New York Times wowed Wall Street with 3Q earnings, in part based on a 4.1% increase in circulation revenues, due in part to its aggressive price increases. Now, does the Times have a significant new churn problem, as evidenced by its woeful numbers, down 4.5% daily, and huge 7.59% on Sunday?

3) The Times' newest competition, the Wall Street Journal, had a smaller turndown of 1.5% daily. So don't the Times deepening woes just whet the appetite of the Journal's soon-to-be-owner Rupert Murdoch?

4) Today, soon-to-be-former New York Daily News TV columnist (and Fresh Air contributor) David Bianculli announced his own place on the web, www.tvworthwatching.com. Isn't it a good irony that he did it on the day his paper reported its circulation decline of 6.8% on Sunday and 1.7% daily. It's another sign of the times that the top talent is jumping (and being pushed) off boats as they take on more water. 

5) With the Star Tribune down (6.5% daily and 4.3% Sunday ) and the Pioneer Press eking out .1% increases, daily and Sunday, don't you think the MinnPost people -- set to launch their site Thursday are smiling, seeing, at this point, only upside?

6) With the Tribune's top three papers all down on Sunday (Chicago Tribune, 2.1%; L.A. Times, 5.1% and Newsday, 4.3%), how much deeper a hole will the Tribune have to dig out of, if the Zell deal falls apart, on FCC moves or other factors?

7) With Scripps re-juggling its newspaper, broadcast, cable and Internet assets, how stable is its partnership in Denver, with Media News, as their combined papers took a 13.5% combined hit on Sunday?

8) With Sunday down more than daily yet again -- by a full percentage point -- how endangered is the one part of Sunday revenue that hasn't yet been hard hit by decline, preprints? As we get into 2008, how much of the preprint revenue will shift from the Sunday paper, which represents more than 50% of many papers' ad revenues?

9) How much longer can the industry sustain 2.5-3.5% declines and maintain its claim as the last mass medium?

What's your question?


Addendum: Good, related piece by Alan Mutter (Reflections of a Newsosaur) focusing on the Sunday decline and its specific, potential impact, here. An excerpt:.

Applying the circulation decline at the 600-plus papers covered by today’s ABC report to the total universe of more than 1,400 daily newspapers published in the United States, it appears that total Sunday circulation of 51.3 million this year will roughly equal daily circulation for the first time since Sunday newspapers began outselling the daily product in 1990.

The slide in Sunday sales to the lowest point since 1975 will reverse a 17-year period during which publishers sold significantly more papers on Sunday than they did during the week, according statistics maintained by the Newspaper Association of America.

November 05, 2007 in 9 Questions, Daily Newspaper Companies, Gannett, New York Times, News Corp/Dow Jones, Tribune |

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edward allen

10. How much longer will newspaper owners pay six-figure salaries to this generation of editors and executives who are performing so poorly? Will there be a wholesale cleaning of the stables, and bringing in of younger and hungry Gen. X editors?

Posted by: edward allen | November 06, 2007 at 10:29 AM

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