Yahoo – AFP,
Rob Lever, 21 April 2014
Washington (AFP) - US newspapers suffered further revenue declines in 2013, seeing only mixed success in a transition to digital, according to industry figures.
 |
Newspapers
are displayed at a newsstand on October 26, 2009 in
San Francisco, California
(AFP Photo/Justin Sullivan)
|
Washington (AFP) - US newspapers suffered further revenue declines in 2013, seeing only mixed success in a transition to digital, according to industry figures.
Total
newspaper industry revenue amounted to $37.59 billion in 2013, a 2.6 percent
drop from $38.60 billion in 2012, according to a report released Friday by the
Newspaper Association of America.
In one
positive sign, the data showed a 3.7 percent increase in circulation revenues
to $10.87 billion, helped by digital subscriptions and "paywalls."
The figures
showed revenue from all digital sources including advertising, circulation and
marketing, rose 5.8 percent and accounted for 12 percent of total industry
revenue.
But
newspapers continued to see declines in print advertising, which has long been
their most important revenue source.
Advertising
in the traditional printed daily and Sunday newspaper decreased 8.6 percent to
$17.3 billion. Digital advertising only partly offset that, rising 1.5 percent
to $3.4 billion.
Poynter
Institute researcher Rick Edmonds said the overall performance of the industry
was the best since 2006.
But Edmonds
noted that because the trade association made changes in how it calculates
figures, using different sources of revenue in the computation, "total
industry revenue figures for the last two years cannot meaningfully be compared
to those for earlier years."
"Though
digital ad revenue gains again failed to make up for print revenue losses,
there was mildly encouraging news on that front," Edmonds said in a blog
post.
"Despite
continued downward pressure on prices and tough competition from digital giants
with virtually no news operations, the industry eked out a gain."
Not
'calamitous' but unimpressive
Others say
the figures don't tell the full story of the bleak state of the newspaper
industry.
"I
think what this report says is that the newspaper business has to find ways to
innovate itself out of the mess in which it finds itself," says Dan
Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University.
"Although
these figures are not calamitous, they are not all that impressive
either."
Kennedy
said that advertising "is never going to come back in the way it has in
the past, because businesses no longer need newspapers to reach their
customers. The Internet gives them a lot of different ways to reach their
customers."
Alan
Mutter, a former newspaper editor who now is a consultant specializing in new
media ventures, said total ad revenues for the newspaper industry have been cut
in half since a 2005 peak at $49 billion.
Mutter said
the key problem for newspapers is that they are not keeping pace with the
competition for digital advertising -- as most of the revenue shifts to
non-media companies like Google or Facebook.
"Digital
advertising rose a mere 1.5 percent to $3.4 billion in 2013 at the same time
that digital sales surged 17 percent across all digital categories in the
United States," Mutter writes in a blog post.
"Back
in 2003, newspapers had a 14 percent share of the national digital advertising
market. In 2013, they had barely eight percent of the market."
Mutter
added that "the ongoing inability of newspapers to compete effectively in
this emerging marketplace may be an even bigger problem than the traumatic
collapse in print advertising that they have suffered over the last eight
years."
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