“Nearly two years after the U.S. economy began climbing out of the worst recession since the 1930s, advertising sales at newspapers have yet to hit bottom,” according to the journalism website Newsosaur, written by Alan Mutter, a former colleague of mine at The Chronicle.
“Now, the question haunting every newspaper executive is: How low will they go? And the daunting question for them is: What can turn things around?
“Clearly new ideas are in order, because economic recovery has not done the trick. And the accumulating evidence suggests that it is not going to do so.
“Although television, online, radio and even magazine ad revenues all moved into positive territory by the end of 2010, newspaper sales dropped 6.3%. At the end of last year, annual print and digital newspaper ad sales, which have skidded lower in every quarter since April, 2006, were 47% below the all-time high of $49.4 billion achieved as recently as 2005.
•”Employers in ever-greater numbers are abandoning newspapers in favor of soliciting applications on their own websites, posting ads on sites aimed at particular professions like nurses or engineers, paying for ads on cheaper job boards like Monster or putting up free ads at places like Craig’s List. High-priced newspaper ads are not needed to connect employers and job candidates.
•”People buying and selling homes, to the degree there are any, increasingly are turning to highly optimized sites like Realtors.Com, Zillow and Trulia, which contain all the listings in a market and have maps, comparable home sales, school performance statistics, financing options and other tools that most newspaper websites can only dream about.
•”With everything from groceries to shoes available on easy-to-use web and mobile sites, consumers increasingly are letting their fingers do the shopping.
The rest of the article is here.
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