New York Times misses revenue forecast, shares tumble (Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)

The New York Times Co reported worse-than-expected results on Thursday as advertisers cut spending on both print and digital outlets, sending shares down 12 percent.

The newspaper company said that revenue was up almost 1 percent to $449 million. Still, the result missed the analysts' consensus estimate of $479.23 million, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Adjusting for severance costs and other special items, the company reported a quarterly loss of 1 cent per share, well below expectations of earnings of 8 cents per share.

The slight uptick in revenue was due to a 7.4 percent rise in circulation revenue helped by the company's digital subscription plans.

But as the company tries to rely more on circulation for its revenue, advertising sales are in a persistent slump.

"It wasn't a nice quarter on revenue," said Edward Atorino, an analyst with Benchmark Co. "The advertising numbers look terrible. I thought they might do a little better. They are caught up in the downslide like everybody else."

The trend of declining national ad revenue was apparent at Gannett Co, the largest newspaper chain in the United States, and its national newspaper USA Today, a competitor to the Times.

While Gannett turned in better-than-expected results last week, national advertising, primarily through USA Today, was down almost 8 percent at its U.S. newspapers.

Once a sprawling media conglomerate, The New York Times has tightened its focus and shed assets. Over the past year, it sold a group of newspapers in the U.S. Southeast and in California, digital property About Group and stakes in sports ventures including the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool Soccer Club.

Thank you, Obadiah. (Now let's see if I can post this comment without it showing up multiple times!)

Here's something I added on the “Online Reporters and Editors” LinkedIn discussion board. I think it has specific relevance for a lot of us on Free Republic.

As the traditional media fall apart, frustrated conservative reporters with a bit of an entrepreneurial mindset have some **MAJOR** opportunities at the local level.

Let me make it crystal clear that I'm not defending blogging. I am painfully aware of the problems caused by untrained people who don't know what they're doing. My point is that blogs are filling in and doing the sort of work that competent reporters are no longer doing on the local level, and which conservatives who **DO** know what they are doing could be providing via a functional business model now that the monopoly of the traditional media has been broken.

The First Amendment exists for a reason. Those of us who value the Constitution need to remember those reasons, and act accordingly.
____

MY POST:

I do, however, think this is showing that the collapse of traditional media coverage of city councils, school boards, etc., isn't resulting in lack of attention but rather attention by bloggers who may or may not have agendas and whose agendas may or may not be obvious.

That sounds a lot like the media environment of the “Yellow Journalism” of the penny press days of the 1800s. We can object to what happened back then, but the reality is back then newspapers were being read and today they aren't.

My view is that we'd better take a long hard look at why newspapers today aren't working, compare ourselves to what was being done by newspapers earlier in media history when they did work, and learn from what the past has to teach us — both examples we can emulate and bad things we can learn to avoid.

Technological changes are the engine driving the collapse of tradition media, but they aren't the only factor. Technological changes simply allowed alternatives to break into what had become a monopoly market. We in the profession of journalism may not like those alternatives — and there are a lot of things that are quite correctly criticized about them — but we'd better figure out why people like the alternatives and figure out how to offer a better product or we aren't going to have jobs much longer.

I’ll defend blogging. I do it every day - local news of school boards, city councils, and county commissions.

It ain’t that hard. Just about anyone that posts here can do it. All that’s required is basic command of the English language, the ability to string a coherent sentence together, and a few note taking skills.

The hard part is the commitment. Once you start, you must stay at it to build a readership. Nothing turns readers off quicker than to go to a blog with no new posts day after day.

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