The Decline of the Newspaper Business

Eric Alterman has a great column on what's going on in the newspaper business:

§ The combined market value of independent, publicly traded US newspaper publishers has fallen by 42 percent in the past three years.

§ The Washington Post Company, with circulation down 14 percent since 2000, now calls itself "an education and media company," as the balance of its profits comes from its purchase of the Stanley Kaplan educational testing business.

§ Advertising--the industry's lifeblood--is also in rapid decline, moving to where it is cheaper and more efficiently targeted on the Internet. Spending for print ads in newspapers fell 9 percent last year, with the fall rapidly accelerating in the third quarter.

§ Newspapers are receiving a declining share of Internet advertising as well. While online ad sales surged 26 percent to more than $15 billion in the first nine months of 2007, according to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, for the first time newspapers no longer received the largest share.

§ The time Americans spend reading newspapers has fallen to just fifteen hours per month.

§ Fully 23 percent of Americans cite the Internet as their main source of election news. And though 26 percent name newspapers as their source, that figure has fallen by more than half since 1996.

§ Young people in particular do not read newspapers and have no interest in acquiring the habit. Daily readership for people under 30 now stands at barely one in five.

§ A recent Goldman Sachs analysis predicted a 7.9 percent decline in ad revenue this year, and cut its earnings forecast for all newspaper-based companies in 2008. Paper costs are going up 11 percent to boot.

The printed newspaper may not make it.