Newspaper Disappearing Act: It’s Not Your Imagination

It’s not your imagination, newspapers are getting smaller. I bought the Sunday Times this weekend for the first time in ages — primarily because I wanted an actual copy of the Nicholas Kristoff-woman’s rights themed Sunday magazine — and it was positively thin; I actually double-checked all the sections were intact before purchasing. However there’s nothing like cold hard numbers to bring the dire reality home. The AP filed this report yesterday about another severe slump in ad sales.

Newspapers’ financial woes worsened in the second quarter as advertising sales shrank by 29 percent, leaving publishers with $2.8 billion less revenue than they had at the same time last year.

It’s the deepest downturn yet during a three-year free fall in advertising revenue — newspapers’ main source of income. The magnitude of the industry’s advertising losses have intensified in each of the last 12 quarters.

The numbers released Thursday by the Newspaper Association of America weren’t a shock, given the dramatic erosion mirrored the advertising losses that the largest U.S. newspaper publishers already had reported for the April-June period.

Still, the statistics served as a stark reminder of the crisis facing newspapers as they try to cope with a brutal recession and advertising trends that have shifted more marketing dollars to the Internet.

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