Posted on 09/17/2012 2:16:30 PM PDT by lbryce
Complete Title:CHART OF THE DAY: And Now Let Us Gasp In Astonishment At What Just Happened To The Newspaper Business
Over the past decade, lots of big newspaper companies have gone bust.
But when you take a look at what's happened to newspaper advertising over that period, it's a wonder they all haven't.
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.
*SNIP*

(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
I take it you're leaning against renewing your subscription ?
< /sarcasm >
The only reason a daily paper is still delivered to my house every day is coupons. My wife is a consummate coupon clipper and I know she saves us well over 10 times the cost of the paper every week in coupon savings. As she shows me every time I get mad at some headline and start yelling to cancel that commie rag. I still hate supporting Gannett news but, hey, Wives don’t understand important issues like that, they get proccupied with trivial matters such as making sure there’s food on the table every night. ;-)
It looks as if the on-line revenues contribute virtually nothing to their income. It confirms my long-held view that their presence on the internet is insufficient to pay all their rather generous salaries.
Newspaper company owners and managers may argue the demise of newspapers has been the consequence of the rise of the internet. However, if that were true, why wouldn’t the traditional newspapers simply incorporate an internet-based delivery system. Isn’t the content what is important? Wouldn’t venerable newspaper publishers also have the experienced staff needed to outperform new start-ups lacking access to the skilled writers employed by newspapers? Newspapers don’t live and die by the physical mode of distribution, do they?
I think you know where I’m going. It is not just the rise of the internet but a problem with the content. The same goes for the movie industry.
It’s curious how it peaked at around the year 2000, when Bush II beat out Gore and the media dropped all pretense of being fair and objective.
If the Internet was the sole cause, then their Internet numbers (in red) wouldn’t have went down simultaneously.
Readers were tired of the trash and cancelled their subscriptions even before all the papers even had websites. Insofar as advertisers look at readership numbers, they saw the folly of spending all the money on a declining reader base.
I’ve found though that coupons are counterproductive in many ways because they may entice one to buy products he would otherwise never consider obtaining.
Journalism commited suicide by becoming shameless propagandists.
Everybody read newspapers back then -- or it seemed like it.
Not many people do nowadays.
It isn't the "News Business", its the Advertising Business.
That is why circulation and ratings are important.
Certainly nobody under 30. Same customer profile as Oldsmobile and Mercury. They're on a glide path to auger in.
The amount of internet advertising is the difference between the blue and red lines. Which appears to be quite similar for 2000 and 2012.
Me personally, I would absolutely do this. Mr. Impulse, that's me. My wife, not so much, she's pretty disiplined.
I used to think so too. But as you can see by the cratering graph, propaganda trumps even profit. They will continue to publish their leftist claptrap even if it costs them an entire industry. Which it will ...
You're right, of course. And the advertisers have followed the ad viewers/readers out the door. The fools in the publisher's penthouse still can't bring themselves to fix the obvious problem. Instead, they tell themselves it's just "bad luck" [bad luck in the Heinlein sense].
A lot of couponing can now be done online. Not as easy as getting a paper, but it can be done.
maybe advertizes don't want their ads run in papers that lie to the public and be guilty by association...
Circulation is down significantly for my “local papers”, mostly IMHO, due to lack of usefull factual information and generally obnoxious editorial slants.
They have even finally stopped allowing newspaper vendors from harassing customers, by giving away “free subscriptions” at my local major grocers and retailers, since those businesses finally clued into the fact that they could communicate better directly to their target area customers, cutting out an expensive “middleman”.
The “coupons” are already in the stores.
I told my wife that when we get rich she can start using coupons.
looks like i was part of a wave.... i used to get a daily newspaper, time and newsweek for about 20 years. i dumped them all after 9/11 because i was determined not to help financially support any propaganda that was siding with our enemies.
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