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And Now Let Us Gasp In Astonishment At What Just Happened To The Newspaper Business
Business Insider ^ | 9/15/12 | Henry Blodget

Posted on 09/17/2012 6:11:36 AM PDT by DManA

Below, via Mark J. Perry and Bill Gross, is a chart we've run before. It shows inflation-adjusted newspaper advertising revenue over the past 60 years.

Thanks to the precipitous decline in the last ~7 years, the industry is now back to where we it was in 1950. And it's only slightly better off when you factor in online revenue.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/newspaper-advertising-collapse-2012-9#ixzz26jSCZVzI

(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: advertising; dbm; enemedia; newspapers; trends
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To: CMAC51
“The campaign of 2008 accelerated an inevitable decline. When the print media failed to examine any details on Obama, it drove the inquiring mind to alternative sources to answer even basic questions. This empowered alternative news sources, most of which were online.

The transition would have occurred anyway, but because of their own behaviour, the print media created a cliff where a slope would have been.”

This is precisely my theory as well. What little credibility the press had after the 1992 election was lost in the 2008 election. The difference between 1991 and 2007 is that in 2007, people had alternatives.

41 posted on 09/17/2012 7:43:11 AM PDT by LaserJock
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To: BilLies

Ah, like the tax on cars to subsidize the buggy-whip industry?


42 posted on 09/17/2012 7:44:54 AM PDT by ctdonath2 ($1 meals: http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com)
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To: Eric in the Ozarks

I dont think the free local weeklies are dead. There is a big market for local paper and advertising.


43 posted on 09/17/2012 7:46:04 AM PDT by Chickensoup (STOP The Great O-ppression)
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To: DManA
You mean the people responsible for publishing this inflammatory garbage:

are having trouble find advertisers and subscribers? Breaks my heart.

44 posted on 09/17/2012 7:48:25 AM PDT by kevkrom (Those in a rush to trample the Constitution seem to forget that it is the source of their authority.)
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To: Chickensoup

You’re right. Shoppers are going strong.
Also daily papers in suburbs don’t have a marketing problem.


45 posted on 09/17/2012 7:48:39 AM PDT by Eric in the Ozarks (I didn't post this. Someone else did.)
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To: Rapscallion
They might recover if they printed real honest fair news and kept opinions on the opinion page.

Might help cable news but it won't help newspapers. They are a business model coming to an end. The only hope they have is for a SHTF scenario. Then maybe they will come back.

46 posted on 09/17/2012 8:06:48 AM PDT by Starstruck (It's all Obama's fault)
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To: DManA

The old media is bleeding to death and they shoot themselves in the foot.
“Never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”
Fewer and fewer barrels......


47 posted on 09/17/2012 8:08:24 AM PDT by blueunicorn6 ("A crack shot and a good dancer")
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To: DManA

When the newspaper industry saw consolidations and failures that made most metropolitan cities go from more than one local newspaper to one-newspaper towns, it was expected that profits would magically rise forever under monopoly conditions.

The first thing the new monopolists did in most areas was to go to their largest advertisers such as car dealers, furniture stores, and department stores and raise their rates. The adverstisers rebelled and found other, cheaper means of advertising including throw-aways, neighborhood papers and TV.

Look at your local paper now; it’s so skinny that there is hardly enough for covering the bottom of a bird cage.


48 posted on 09/17/2012 8:30:31 AM PDT by wildbill (You're just jealous because the Voices talk oMnly to me.)
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To: GeronL

You are so right. Over the weekend I was channel surfing and came across GMC Channel. They are running the series Touched By an Angel. I remember my wife and kids and I watching, and loving the show. So great to see it again. I began to wonder, in this age of everything gay and sexual subtext, how such a show would fare again (given the opportunity). A network in dire straits would do well to launch such Sunday evening entertainment again.


49 posted on 09/17/2012 9:12:47 AM PDT by Sgt_Schultze (A half-truth is a complete lie)
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To: Sgt_Schultze

It will never happen.

If someone launched a conservative channel with shows like that, it would probably not get picked up by cable systems and then there would be a leftist outcry about its bias if it did and boycotts of sponsors.


50 posted on 09/17/2012 9:32:18 AM PDT by GeronL (The Right to Life came before the Right to Pursue Happiness)
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To: GeronL

you mean like Glen Beck’s TV station?

channel 212?

which the MSM is working overtime to ignore?


51 posted on 09/17/2012 9:35:43 AM PDT by longtermmemmory (VOTE! http://www.senate.gov and http://www.house.gov)
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To: DManA; abb

When the two-paper cities began becoming one paper cities I thought a good idea would be for the second paper to either shrink or even become a tabloid. They might have found a niche instead of trying to be a clone of the bigger paper.

Imagine a thinner paper with a conservative editorial page focusing mostly on local news and issues with a small staff. Sort of like a small town daily in a big city, it’s circulation wouldn’t have to be nearly as big as the other to stay afloat.

But they all wanted to be the NY Times or Wash Post.


52 posted on 09/17/2012 9:36:10 AM PDT by GeronL (The Right to Life came before the Right to Pursue Happiness)
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To: longtermmemmory

I don’t have Direct TV or whatever its on, I’m sure it won’t last too long. He’ll say something that is twisted out of shape and they’ll be protests and it’ll be dropped.


53 posted on 09/17/2012 9:41:13 AM PDT by GeronL (The Right to Life came before the Right to Pursue Happiness)
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To: DManA
I wonder of Barry has promised a big subsidy to "save" the newspaper industry. It would explain their 24/7 campaign to reelect the President.

There's always been crooks - but I'm old enough to remember when most members of the press were honorable...

54 posted on 09/17/2012 9:41:46 AM PDT by GOPJ (first they came for those clinging to their guns and religion, and I did not speak out....)
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To: DManA
I wonder of Barry has promised a big subsidy to "save" the newspaper industry. It would explain their 24/7 campaign to reelect the President.

There's always been crooks - but I'm old enough to remember when most members of the press were honorable...Now? Nothing would surprise me.

55 posted on 09/17/2012 9:42:13 AM PDT by GOPJ (first they came for those clinging to their guns and religion, and I did not speak out....)
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To: GeronL

There is still this body of thought out there that if a newspaper becomes “local” only, they can actually turn a profit.

After watching the “local” papers up close for over three years and sitting next to their “reporters” in town meetings, I can tell you they are not faring much better than the big metro papers.

The ONLY thing that’s keeping the local weeklies and small town dailies from folding is the money they get from government in the form of legal ads. Which is a direct subsidy, in this day and time of the internet and government websites.

Take that away from them, and they dry up and blow away.


56 posted on 09/17/2012 9:43:52 AM PDT by abb ("What ISN'T in the news is often more important than what IS." Ed Biersmith, 1942 -)
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To: abb

Sounds like the papers of the 1850’s


57 posted on 09/17/2012 9:51:39 AM PDT by GeronL (The Right to Life came before the Right to Pursue Happiness)
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To: GOPJ; DManA

There were proposals of a government voucher to subscribe t newspapers. It’s pretty disturbing.


58 posted on 09/17/2012 9:54:00 AM PDT by GeronL (The Right to Life came before the Right to Pursue Happiness)
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To: GeronL

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/jesse.shapiro/research/PoliticalInfluence.pdf

Do Newspapers Serve the State? Incumbent Party Influence on the US Press, 1869-1928

Historians have documented a number of channels by which incumbent parties used the machinery of the state to benefit sympathetic newspapers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The most important were contracts to print government documents (records of legislative proceedings, official forms, notices, laws, and so forth); these contracts were often allocated at inflated prices to papers affiliated with the party in power (Baldasty 1992, 21; Abbott 2004, 45; Summers 1994, 48, 54, 60, 210-214).

In a detailed study of Wisconsin newspapers from 1849-1860, Dyer (1989) shows that such contracts from the state government accounted for roughly half of the revenue of large party newspapers in the state capital, and ten to twenty percent of the revenue of smaller English-language papers near the frontier (29-31). Abbott (2004) similarly finds that printing patronage was the “most important” revenue source for many papers throughout the South (45).


59 posted on 09/17/2012 10:07:13 AM PDT by abb ("What ISN'T in the news is often more important than what IS." Ed Biersmith, 1942 -)
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To: DManA

I’d like to see the raw numbers, just to make sure that the claim of “adjusted for inflation” is indeed accurate.

Inflation is one of those real “bitches” that can sneak up on you. For example between the time I started to work at my last company in 1984 and when I left, my salary “nearly doubled”, yet when I checked it with the inflation calculator I was stunned. I hadn’t gained at all when compared to 1984 dollars. I had gone down by a couple of thousand and my taxes had climbed because I was in a much higher tax bracket.

But dollar wise I had done very well for myself. Too bad it wasn’t still in 1984 dollars.


60 posted on 09/17/2012 10:12:48 AM PDT by The Working Man
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