Media News - Monday, June 16, 2008

U.S. Newspapers’ print ads declined 14 percent in record drop

U.S. newspapers' print advertising sales fell the most on record in the first quarter, tumbling 14 percent on shrinking real-estate and job markets, and the loss of business to the Internet. Advertisers spent USD 8.43bn on newspaper ads in the first three months of 2008, according to the Newspaper Association of America, the eighth drop in a row. Real estate and recruitment ads each fell 35 percent. Many of the industry's biggest advertisers in real estate, automotive and employment are cutting spending and shifting advertising to their own Web sites, said Kip Cassino, research director at Borrell Associates, a media consulting firm in Williamsburg, Virginia. 'Newspapers' biggest competitors are their former advertisers,' Cassino said. 'The newspapers concentrated their efforts for a long time on a few categories like auto and help- wanted, and those categories are now moving away from them.' The decline was the biggest on record in trade association data going back to 1971. The previous mark was an 11.9 percent drop in the fourth quarter of 2001, when the economy was in recession. Newspapers' Web sites aren't attracting enough dollars to pick up the slack. Newspaper-owned sites attracted USD 804m in advertising during the quarter, the NAA said, up 7.2 percent from last year and the smallest gain since the industry group began reporting online sales growth in 2004. (Bloomberg)

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