Would have, could have, should have… but I wonder how different things would be if newspape companies would have embraced the Web, instead of trying to hide their heads in the sand over it.
Newspaper circulation nationally reached its peak in 1984, when there were 1,600 morning and afternoon paid dailies with a circulation of 63 million. With the rise of cable television and, later, the Internet, newspaper circulation began to decline. Today there are 1,450 paid dailies with a circulation of 53 million. The losses have accelerated over the last two years.
While many newspapers still have healthy profit margins, their costs are up and ad revenue is down.
On the bright side, says the Newspaper Association of America, ad spending on newspaper Web sites jumped 31.5 percent last year compared with the year before, to $2.7 billion.
The bad news is that online spending accounted for only 5.4 percent of all newspaper ad expenditures in 2006, the association reported. And print revenue fell 3.7 percent for the fourth quarter of 2006, to $13.2 billion, compared with the same period in 2005.
Online spending is projected to continue to grow, and many newspapers are investing more and more in their Web sites. But so far, the online revenue is too small to begin to compensate for the losses from print advertising.
Via NYT.
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