Posted on 10/25/2012 9:21:47 AM PDT by Zakeet
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 stock dropped 12 percent to $9.37 in morning trade.
[Snip]
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.
[Snip]
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Under my brilliant management, we're shedding readers and dropping ad revenues ... in the middle of a national election ... at a time when news junkies are gobbling up tons of information and candidates are spending gazillions of dollars ... and let me assure you always critical Freepers ... that ain't easy to do!
Love the smell of face palm in the morning.
Pinch got punched and is in poo ... ping!
Good to hear that the New York Times is following Newsweek’s fine example to going bankrupt....
Can't always believe what the NY Times reports.
LMAO!
ROTFLMAO!!!
lol.
Like a punch to the face
Circulation and advertising revenues down at McClatchy
Lets see- maybe people want actual NEWS from a supposed news source
These bozos said that Obama won all three debates... Would you PAY for that kind of quality work?
I'm not disagreeing with your main point, but the fact is that all media are in trouble, particularly print, and the trouble crosses ideological lines. Even conservative newspapers like the Washington Times are having serious financial difficulties and laying off many reporters.
The advertiser-supported print media model that has operated since the early-to-mid-1800s clearly isn't working, and as readers migrate to the internet, nobody has yet figured out how to make enough money to support the kind of newsgathering staffs needed to run a major metro newspaper.
Here's the comment I posted on a newspaper trade group discussion board responding to a young journalism student wondering how to get a job in the current environment. I think it shows some of the problems inherent in technology shifts.
____
If (NAME DELETED) is still reading, she's seen from the variety of advice that journalism is in chaos, the old road maps often lead people into dead ends, and nobody has yet figured out whether the new roads now opening are going to end with driving off cliffs, landing in swamps or sand traps, or actually get drivers somewhere they want to go.
Michelle, I did read your profile. You're at a well-known journalism school and have prior background at your university's newspaper. I'm assuming you're asking here because you want “real world” advice in addition to what you're already getting from professors.
The old career paths of journalism for the last half-century or so have been either:
1) go to J-school, write for the school newspaper, do internships, and use your clips to get your first job at a small newspaper in a big chain so you could get promoted to a larger newspaper, often in the same chain, or
2) for mid-career people, leverage in-depth knowledge of your current career into a specialist beat position by learning how to write and demonstrating your ability to write, either with freelance work or with a masters degree from a J-school, or
3) for people at both early and mid-career stages, get freelance jobs at a local newspaper unrelated to your current employment and try to convince an editor to turn your part-time or free work into a full-time job.
As those three options (and some comments above) show, lots of reporters learned technical skills of how to write but didn't know their communities or their subjects very well. People moved from small newspapers to large newspapers and typically didn't develop in-depth knowledge of their communities. The result has been that people who were subject matter experts in certain fields, or who knew their communities very well, could provide an asset to an editor that someone with a traditional journalism school education quite often could not.
Go back to your journalism history to see how newspapers looked in the days of the Pulitzers, the Hearsts, etc... it was anything but the professional model we've seen starting to develop in the early 1900s which became dominant in the post-WW2 era.
Except for the very oldest reporters living today, we've grown up in an environment where economics of scale had pretty much driven competition out of the print media and made it financially impossible to start a brand-new newspaper in a major city without massive infusion of capital. I can't think of any papers except the Washington Times and USA Today in the last four decades where that happened successfully, and though there may be some others, I trust it's obvious that economics allowed large newspapers and large newspaper chains to create standards of professional practices, education, and training for journalists which, while certainly not mandatory, became a general model for metro newspapers and have been at least a goal for smaller newspapers.
Most of that has radically changed in the last decade. The same economics of scale which once made large newspapers impossible to compete against are now driving those large newspapers out of business, and making it quite realistic for startup operations to effectively compete against traditional newsgathering operations. Something like Politico or Huffington Post or local media like the St. Louis Beacon would have been unthinkable in the 1980s. While those are professional operations, literally anyone with no training can start writing and try to get an audience, and in some cases may succeed.
Where does that leave us? I don't think any of us know for sure. What I do know is that many of the old rules simply don't work anymore, and you need to know up front that you're going into a line of work with no safe road maps.
That can be exciting or it can be scary. Either way, it's not for the naive or the fainthearted. Make sure you know what you're doing before you start, and be prepared to take risks.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point, but the fact is that all media are in trouble, particularly print, and the trouble crosses ideological lines. Even conservative newspapers like the Washington Times are having serious financial difficulties and laying off many reporters.
The advertiser-supported print media model that has operated since the early-to-mid-1800s clearly isn't working, and as readers migrate to the internet, nobody has yet figured out how to make enough money to support the kind of newsgathering staffs needed to run a major metro newspaper.
Here's the comment I posted on a newspaper trade group discussion board responding to a young journalism student wondering how to get a job in the current environment. I think it shows some of the problems inherent in technology shifts.
____
If (NAME DELETED) is still reading, she's seen from the variety of advice that journalism is in chaos, the old road maps often lead people into dead ends, and nobody has yet figured out whether the new roads now opening are going to end with driving off cliffs, landing in swamps or sand traps, or actually get drivers somewhere they want to go.
Michelle, I did read your profile. You're at a well-known journalism school and have prior background at your university's newspaper. I'm assuming you're asking here because you want “real world” advice in addition to what you're already getting from professors.
The old career paths of journalism for the last half-century or so have been either:
1) go to J-school, write for the school newspaper, do internships, and use your clips to get your first job at a small newspaper in a big chain so you could get promoted to a larger newspaper, often in the same chain, or
2) for mid-career people, leverage in-depth knowledge of your current career into a specialist beat position by learning how to write and demonstrating your ability to write, either with freelance work or with a masters degree from a J-school, or
3) for people at both early and mid-career stages, get freelance jobs at a local newspaper unrelated to your current employment and try to convince an editor to turn your part-time or free work into a full-time job.
As those three options (and some comments above) show, lots of reporters learned technical skills of how to write but didn't know their communities or their subjects very well. People moved from small newspapers to large newspapers and typically didn't develop in-depth knowledge of their communities. The result has been that people who were subject matter experts in certain fields, or who knew their communities very well, could provide an asset to an editor that someone with a traditional journalism school education quite often could not.
Go back to your journalism history to see how newspapers looked in the days of the Pulitzers, the Hearsts, etc... it was anything but the professional model we've seen starting to develop in the early 1900s which became dominant in the post-WW2 era.
Except for the very oldest reporters living today, we've grown up in an environment where economics of scale had pretty much driven competition out of the print media and made it financially impossible to start a brand-new newspaper in a major city without massive infusion of capital. I can't think of any papers except the Washington Times and USA Today in the last four decades where that happened successfully, and though there may be some others, I trust it's obvious that economics allowed large newspapers and large newspaper chains to create standards of professional practices, education, and training for journalists which, while certainly not mandatory, became a general model for metro newspapers and have been at least a goal for smaller newspapers.
Most of that has radically changed in the last decade. The same economics of scale which once made large newspapers impossible to compete against are now driving those large newspapers out of business, and making it quite realistic for startup operations to effectively compete against traditional newsgathering operations. Something like Politico or Huffington Post or local media like the St. Louis Beacon would have been unthinkable in the 1980s. While those are professional operations, literally anyone with no training can start writing and try to get an audience, and in some cases may succeed.
Where does that leave us? I don't think any of us know for sure. What I do know is that many of the old rules simply don't work anymore, and you need to know up front that you're going into a line of work with no safe road maps.
That can be exciting or it can be scary. Either way, it's not for the naive or the fainthearted. Make sure you know what you're doing before you start, and be prepared to take risks.
I'm not disagreeing with your main point, but the fact is that all media are in trouble, particularly print, and the trouble crosses ideological lines. Even conservative newspapers like the Washington Times are having serious financial difficulties and laying off many reporters.
The advertiser-supported print media model that has operated since the early-to-mid-1800s clearly isn't working, and as readers migrate to the internet, nobody has yet figured out how to make enough money to support the kind of newsgathering staffs needed to run a major metro newspaper.
Here's the comment I posted on a newspaper trade group discussion board responding to a young journalism student wondering how to get a job in the current environment. I think it shows some of the problems inherent in technology shifts.
____
If (NAME DELETED) is still reading, she's seen from the variety of advice that journalism is in chaos, the old road maps often lead people into dead ends, and nobody has yet figured out whether the new roads now opening are going to end with driving off cliffs, landing in swamps or sand traps, or actually get drivers somewhere they want to go.
Michelle, I did read your profile. You're at a well-known journalism school and have prior background at your university's newspaper. I'm assuming you're asking here because you want “real world” advice in addition to what you're already getting from professors.
The old career paths of journalism for the last half-century or so have been either:
1) go to J-school, write for the school newspaper, do internships, and use your clips to get your first job at a small newspaper in a big chain so you could get promoted to a larger newspaper, often in the same chain, or
2) for mid-career people, leverage in-depth knowledge of your current career into a specialist beat position by learning how to write and demonstrating your ability to write, either with freelance work or with a masters degree from a J-school, or
3) for people at both early and mid-career stages, get freelance jobs at a local newspaper unrelated to your current employment and try to convince an editor to turn your part-time or free work into a full-time job.
As those three options (and some comments above) show, lots of reporters learned technical skills of how to write but didn't know their communities or their subjects very well. People moved from small newspapers to large newspapers and typically didn't develop in-depth knowledge of their communities. The result has been that people who were subject matter experts in certain fields, or who knew their communities very well, could provide an asset to an editor that someone with a traditional journalism school education quite often could not.
Go back to your journalism history to see how newspapers looked in the days of the Pulitzers, the Hearsts, etc... it was anything but the professional model we've seen starting to develop in the early 1900s which became dominant in the post-WW2 era.
Except for the very oldest reporters living today, we've grown up in an environment where economics of scale had pretty much driven competition out of the print media and made it financially impossible to start a brand-new newspaper in a major city without massive infusion of capital. I can't think of any papers except the Washington Times and USA Today in the last four decades where that happened successfully, and though there may be some others, I trust it's obvious that economics allowed large newspapers and large newspaper chains to create standards of professional practices, education, and training for journalists which, while certainly not mandatory, became a general model for metro newspapers and have been at least a goal for smaller newspapers.
Most of that has radically changed in the last decade. The same economics of scale which once made large newspapers impossible to compete against are now driving those large newspapers out of business, and making it quite realistic for startup operations to effectively compete against traditional newsgathering operations. Something like Politico or Huffington Post or local media like the St. Louis Beacon would have been unthinkable in the 1980s. While those are professional operations, literally anyone with no training can start writing and try to get an audience, and in some cases may succeed.
Where does that leave us? I don't think any of us know for sure. What I do know is that many of the old rules simply don't work anymore, and you need to know up front that you're going into a line of work with no safe road maps.
That can be exciting or it can be scary. Either way, it's not for the naive or the fainthearted. Make sure you know what you're doing before you start, and be prepared to take risks.
Get it out of your head that just because the paper is losing money that it will go away.
Or, the stories about buying the Trib and the LA Times could all be a feint, designed to force the heirs to sell the Times to Murdoch. Remember, there has been no dividend for almost 4 years..so lots of people in the family are hurting, and the stock price is down 90% from 10 years ago..
It's a $9/share now..no real upside prospects..and there's not much left to sell off. I wonder if an offer of $15/share..cash would crack open the voting trusts...Rupert did it with the Bancrofts..got them to sell the WSJ..
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