Bottom Line Communications

Newspapers are shrinking.

    Thinner. Lighter. Skinnier. There's a good chance your daily newspaper is a lot easier to lift off your front stoop than it used to be.

  Economic pressures and competition are brutal, forcing newspapers to slim down. Industry experts warn that editorial quality could suffer. But does dieting have to be a negative development? No.

    "Even though reporters gauge the importance of a story by length, that's not how readers do it," says Alan Jacobson, president of Brass Tacks Design, a newspaper design firm in Norfolk, Va. "They want shorter. They want things chosen for them that they care about. It goes back to relevance."

    Good or bad, the accelerating erosion in advertising revenue has the industry on a shocking starvation diet. The Newspaper Association of America, or NAA, said last week that print advertising at U.S. newspapers sank 9.4% in 2007 to $42.2 billion, the sharpest annual decline since the association began tallying industry ad revenue in 1950.

    Fewer ads means fewer pages. And those pages are getting smaller too. Many newspapers, including prominent dailies, like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, have adopted narrower page width to save on printing costs (editor's note: the KC Star has also done this).

    Stock-price tables, made redundant by Internet news, are being phased out at many papers. Some large metropolitan newspapers--including The Denver Post and The Orange County Register--have folded their business news into other parts of the paper. The Seattle Times consolidated stand-alone entertainment and food and wine sections into the features section.

   Add to that the continued decline in circulation, newsprint consumption's down as a result. U.S. newspapers consumed an estimated 447,000 metric tons of newsprint in February, down 11.8% from a year earlier, according to the NAA.

    Those reductions represent badly needed cost savings, without which struggling newspaper companies like Gannett, McClatchy and others would be even worse off than they are right now.

     Critics are worried. "Advertisers want audiences that want the medium," says Anne Gordon, a former managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer who is now a partner at the Stamford, Conn., investment firm of Dubilier & Co.   "With each of these cutbacks, you give audiences a reason to go somewhere else."

     Gail DeGeorge, president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and an editor at the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., calls the trend "really disturbing."

    "There's never been a more important time for a stand-alone business section as there is now," she explains.

But it's probably the least worst option for newspapers facing severe cost-cutting pressures, says Todd Brownrout, a former advertising executive at The Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, who is now chief marketing officer of 2AdPro, a provider of outsourced advertising design and management services.

    Brownrout estimates a typical newspaper generates about 35% of its advertising revenue from classified ads and about 15% to 20% from inserts. The main A-section of the paper generates most of the rest, perhaps about two-thirds, while features, business and sports sections account for the remainder.

    "I don't think there's a single publisher who thinks, 'My readers aren't interested,' or 'I don't have a commitment,' or "It's not valuable,'" Brownrout says of the elimination of separate business and features sections. "But you end up in a situation where your hands are tied. The market is sending a message that newspapers have to bring their cost base down."

    Rivals are taking advantage. Weekly business newspapers in Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix and Dallas have notched modest circulation gains during the last two years even as the daily newspapers in those same markets have lost readers, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

   "Advertising usage is becoming more niche-like and more localized for certain kinds of companies," says Cathey Finlon, chief executive of McClain Finlon Advertising in Denver, citing weekly business journals and small community weeklies as beneficiaries of this interest in targeted advertising.

   For daily newspapers, being forced to figure out what readers want and boiling stories down to their essential core can ultimately pay rich dividends--if they do it right.

   "The real challenge that it creates for a news team is to make sure that what you have in your paper is extremely relevant to your audience," says John Kimball, the NAA's chief marketing officer. "If you're in the market and you're the local news provider, you sure as hell better make sure you're doing well in local news coverage. If you give that up or you don't pay attention to it, or you don't know the demographics or the market conditions, then yeah, I think you're vulnerable."

   Even the shrunken physical size of a paper isn't necessarily a bad thing--in fact, it's what many readers want, according to Jacobson.

    "Readers definitely prefer smaller--both narrower and shorter," he says. "They don't want more. They want less."

    Link: http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/02/newspapers-advertising-publishing-biz-media-cx_lh_0402sections.html?partner=email