The Modern Journalist

Print Revenues Have Historic Drop. No Worries, We Have Blogs

The Newspaper Association of America announced that 2007 revenues dropped 9.4 percent, the largest single year drop since the industry tracked advertising metrics.

That’s not great news.

Of course, online revenues continued to climb — 18.8 percent — although that growth was off the 31.4 percent growth from the previous year. But I’m not going to paint a near 19 percent growth as bad news. Still, the online revenues weren’t enough to offset the overall losses.

But it’s not too difficult to see what needs to be done to save the industry.

Newspapers need to channel far more of their resources into the digital portions of their business, which means ditching journalists — you have plenty of them already — and hiring technologically savvy people who understand how to create web applications that encourage readership, sharing and repeated visits.

Now it’s easy to look at the numbers — online represents less than 8 percent of the overall revenue generation — and think that it’s not yet time to invest heavily in an area of the business that’s not producing results.

The problem with that thinking is that we already know this is the fastest growing (re: only growing) revenue source for papers. To capitalize on that, papers need to invest and build out those tools before they are completely usurped by modern media companies

And it’s ridiculous to even try to fight this wave. Already, journalists are turning to blogs — the very tools so many journalists rail against — for their own research.

Nearly 73 percent of respondents sometimes or always use blogs in their research. The most often cited reason for using blogs was "to measure sentiment."

Of course they do. Blogs and the social media sphere are wonderful places to go for information, to engage with the public. Wouldn’t it be great if newspapers actively encouraged such participation within their own sites?

Imagine the revenue-generating possibilities.