Newspapers May Have a Future After All

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Buyers: Newspapers
have years to go

For all their troubles, media people see a future

By Louisa Ada Seltzer
Feb 17, 2009


The latest forecast for America's newspapers would suggest that extinction is not too far off. UBS figures newspaper revenues will be down 12.2 percent when the final figures are in for 2008 and tumble another 17.6 percent this year.

Already, a number of papers around the country have cut circulation, or frequency, or both, and others have gone online only, scrapping their print editions entirely.

More of that is widely expected to occur this year as the ad recession deepens.

Yet media planners and buyers don't see print newspapers disappearing, certainly not anytime soon, and they're fairly upbeat about the changes papers could introduce to stem at least some of the declines.

That's the take-away from a recent reader survey on Media Life.

Asked to say how many years before newspapers went totally online, the largest share of respondents, 32 percent, said never.

The next-largest share, 19 percent, thought five years, and the next-largest share after that, 16 percent, thought 10 years.

Readers were then asked to identify the big trend among newspapers and were told they could choose more than one answers.

More than half, 56 percent, agreed with this statement: "Beefing up online operations and phasing out print over time."