How bad is it in the newspaper business? Go get a copy of your Sunday paper and count the ads. Go ahead. I'll wait. It probably won't take you very long.
Editorial types tend not to pay much attention to ads, even though they pay most of their salaries. But the stark problems facing newspapers are easily understood if you go through a paper and look at the advertising. If you can find it.
My Sunday newspaper is The Washington Post, long one of the most successful papers in the nation, by any measure. The Post rules the local advertising market (at one point, it was claimed, something like 80 percent of the ad dollars in the Washington market were spent on The Post), and commands high penetration among its audience (though not what it used to be), which should make it catnip for advertisers.
But those were the good old days. I was reading today's Post and suddenly found myself saying, "Um, where are the ads?" So I sat down and counted the ads in the paper's news sections. The results: Not good.
Today's paper, by my count, has just over 14 pages of ads in 102 pages in its main news sections (A section, Metro, Business, Sports, Outlook, Style & Arts, Sunday Source, Travel and Book World). That's less than a 14 percent ratio of ads to news. Total number of display ads bigger than an a column inch or two? About 60 (a few classifieds-like directory pages help pad the overall ad total). Total full-page ads: Just three.
Most of the sections had fewer than a page of ads in them (the A section had the vast majority). Business, Sports and the Sunday Source "living" section didn't have a full page of ads between them—in 32 pages of newsprint. Yikes.
But wait, you say! It's a holiday weekend! Fair enough. So I went to the recycling pile and got last Sunday's paper. The results were better, but not much: Just under 18 pages of ads in 96 total pages, a 19.5 percent ratio. The other measures were proportionally similar to this week's paper.
That's not good, and it gets even scarier when you hear about publishers like Tribune Co. moving to tighten its papers to a 50-50 news/ad ratio. A ratio like that would have tightened today's Post to, gulp, 28 pages. It may not be that bad if classifieds sections, which have virtually no news content, are included in the ratio. But the Post's classifieds sections are flimsy these days, too. On Sundays, inserts and coupons help bulk up the advertising take, as well—but even those getting thinner.
These are hard times for newspapers, as has been well-documented. But it really hits home when you pick up a paper, count the ads, and find yourself wondering how much news space you'd have to cut to match the steep decline in advertising space. Or how long a business can go on without enough revenue to pay for producing its primary product.
Remember when you used to need a horse-drawn cart to lug you Sunday New York Times from your doorstep into your house?
Now it can be carried by a child.
Of course, there was a time when a 28-page Washington Post was normal, and it was profitable.
Big editions came along fairly late in newspaper history, as they went even further down the path of being all things to all people, and were fortunate enough to have little enough advertising competition to get away with it.
Posted by: Howard Owens | July 06, 2008 at 04:24 PM
I cancelled the Post a year ago. It wasn't being delivered, or it was being ripped off by a neighbor in my complex, or whatever _ I wasn't getting it. I now periodically get mail from the Post begging me to come back, and this week in my mailbox came a "big summer savings" offer to get the Post for 49 cents a week for the next 26 weeks.
Posted by: ed | July 06, 2008 at 04:58 PM
I posted a while back about declining the Post's occasional offer for a free daily paper. (http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2007/07/not-even-for-fr.html) As a former Postie, with many friends there, it pained me to do it. But I'd rather read it online.
Posted by: Mark Potts | July 06, 2008 at 05:36 PM
Did you count the inserts (Target, Wal-Mart, etc.) in making your calculation? Under postal regulations, those have to count in the total news/ad ratio for the paper. If you didn't count those using the same column inch equivalents as the broadsheet paper, then the ad percentage is probably much higher. Still, that doesn't overcome the big picture. If they figure out a satisfying way to deliver those fliers to our computers, not by direct mail, newspapers can say so long to that revenue as well.
Posted by: King Friday | July 07, 2008 at 03:26 PM
Airlines can send me pricing just for routes that I'm interested in, based on my travel and search history in their databases. The turmoil in the industry has kept them from being more aggressive on these investments. (It's also reduced the advertising they do in papers that aren't delivered to hotels.)
The insert business will go away too. Target sometimes runs specials only online.
http://blog.agrawals.org/2007/04/08/advertisers-disintermediating-newspapers-too/
Harris Teeter, a grocery store on the East Coast, will send you weekly specials. The email is customized based on what you've purchased in their loyalty program. Rather than look through eight pages of stuff I may or may not be interested in, I get specials that I AM interested in.
http://blog.agrawals.org/2007/07/24/e-vic-personalization-that-works/
It's only a matter of time before more businesses do that.
Posted by: Rocky | July 07, 2008 at 05:40 PM
Everything that newspapers have created in all their history is open source. All of it. There are no secrets. The editing, the ethics, the best practices, the news gathering, the advertising and graphics knowledge. There are no patents and if newspapers fail because of their business model, everything that every journalist has contributed to this vast knowledge base will live on nonetheless.
So what is the concern if the DNA survives?
Why not transfer this knowledge to local neighborhood bloggers and help them develop into professional operatoins? For many, it is the dream. That holds true for sports bloggers, entertainment bloggers. The knowledge may be open source but the expertise and services needed are much diffent things.
Newspapers are platform providers. They are to the development of journalism what code developers are to the Linux operating system. Linux is open source but vendors add value to it by providing services and expertise. This is how Red Hat and Suse make money -- they supply a platform with their own expertise mixed in. Newspapers can be the new service providers to the emerging independent world, but I see no evidence or appetite for it so most newspaper are doomed. The layoffs will be a crude way to help transfer knowledge, but for now it's the only way.
Posted by: kob | July 08, 2008 at 06:33 PM