The numbers don't lie. Or do they?

Well, something doesn’t add up. When Martin Langeveld crunched the numbers, he found that newspaper Web ads were yielding an absurdly high CPM (cost per thousand page views) of $80.28.

I knew that number couldn’t be correct, as I recalled an instructive post by Ethan Zuckerman:

While highly targeted ads (an ad for roofing services in Pittsfield, MA) might be worth several dollars a click, most ads sell for a dollar or less a click, often much less. An ad that sells for a buck a click and gets 1% clickthrough is functionally a $10 CPM ad, which suggests that lots of ad inventory (the nickel-a-click stuff) selling at sub-$1 CPM.

Ryan Chittum agreed the number was ridiculously high and endeavored to come up with an explanation:

Always look on the bright side of layoffs

From the “sensitivity during hard times” file, this Virginian-Pilot headline: Pilot to lay off 40, but executives say outlook is brighter.

As the opening graf of Philip Walzer’s article attests, the layoffs “will be the third wave of job cuts at The Pilot in the past six months.”

Nevertheless, The Pilot’s financial outlook is brightening, said Maurice Jones, the president and publisher.

Combined, the newspaper and its associated companies turned a profit in the first quarter of the year, said Jones, who declined to disclose figures. March was The Pilot’s most robust month in at least a year, he said, with every unit recording a profit.

But the profits, Jones said, still fall short of the company’s targets, required to pay taxes and other bills and equipment costs, including the modernization of its printing press. That, he said, triggered the latest cutbacks.

One-stop shop for print ads

MediaShift takes a look at an online print marketplace called MediaBids, which empowers businesses looking to advertise:

While the exciting part might be the way they sell ads by auction, the real secret sauce for hyper-locals is that Mediabids is a one-stop shop for getting quotes and buying print ads. All the exchanges are through their website. Another plus is that if there’s a snag in the purchase process, you’ll have MediaBids on your side to walk you through it. It makes placing advertising so easy that any publication that wants to build a relationship with small local businesses has an easy online purchasing system already in place.

"Death spiral" is preferred way to describe newspaper industry

In  “‘Death’ of papers seen as oversold” (April 1, 2009), the Washington Times looks at an ongoing journalistic craze with no end in sight: reporters navel gazing over every layoff, furlough and quarterly loss of ad revenue as signs of the coming apocalypse for the newspaper industry:

Each monetary woe — whether it’s the New York Times cutting salaries by 5 percent or layoffs at the Houston Chronicle — is lumped together under the heading “the death of newspapers.”

The exact phrase “death of newspapers” was used to headline or anchor more than 300 separate news stories in the past year, according to a Nexis search — that’s about 25 stories per month that have pronounced the death of the genre. “Death of print” is another favorite.

So is “death spiral,” which made an appearance (via citation) in my recent post Visual proof that newspapers are doomed.

In fact, it was seeing ”death spiral” for the umpteenth time that got me wondering: Is it my imagination, or has the term really been as overused as it appears?

Reinventing the newspaper

I know what you’re thinking (cause I”m clairvoyant like that): “Not again. Not another post on how to save newspapers.” Ah, but this one is pretty darn good, tapping into the wisdom of 10 experts who offer advice on how to keep the presses rolling. Here are a few of the highlights:

On reinventing the core product:

Leonsis: [Develop] a core competency in ad sales so that the organization can represent other local media companies to build scale and create mini advertising.com-like businesses in each market.

On the audience for newspapers:

Mutter: Editors and publishers need to adopt a zero-based, market-driven approach to what they do. They need to learn to ask their readers and nonreaders what they want—and then respond creatively to the answers.

On the role of the print product:

Hall: Print is good at the things the Web is not good at—watchdog, explanatory, enterprise, narrative storytelling. The two media complement one another. One is the flowing river, changing constantly; the other is the rock on the shore, fixed and solid.

On reinventing the newspaper to work in concert with online offerings:

Visual proof that newspapers are doomed

You’ve read the statistics. Now we have visual confirmation that newspapers are in a death spiral:

“That’s just a whirlpool,” you say? Maybe to someone without a taste for visual metaphor. But trust me — that’s a death spiral, and newspapers are floundering just below the surface.

And this stock photo? Just a pile of newspapers burning? Au contraire — it’s the symbolic loss of revenue from classified ads. There goes your main source of revenue, up in smoke. Craigslist says it smells great.

Still not convinced, given the irrefutable stock photo evidence?

Well, perhaps THIS will change your mind …

Breaking news: 2008 worst ever for newspapers

This just in from TechCrunch: Erick Schonfeld takes just about every bit of bad financial news about the U.S. newspaper industry and packages them into one depressing post. A few lowlights, by the numbers:

• $7.5 billion — decline in advertising revenues from 2007
• 8 percent — decline in online revenues for fourth quarter 2008, from the previous year
• 1.8 percent — overall decline in online advertising
• 19.4 percent — decline in advertising dollars in fourth quarter, 2008 (which, as Schonfeld points out, is “the sixth straight quarter in which the rate of decline has been accelerating“)

The New Republic on the golden age of newspapers

As newspapers downsize or shut down altogether, hyperlocal coverage has been viewed by many, myself included, as a way of adjusting  to the new economic realities ushered in by the Web. But in the March 4 New Republic, Paul Starr points out the drawbacks of niche coverage and relying on other sources for national and international news:

Just as there are other sources for international news, so there are other sources of Washington coverage–but journalists from regional papers perform a special service for their readers, monitoring their representatives in Congress and reporting on federal programs from a local angle.

Newsosaur's prescriptions for newspapers transitioning to an online model

In his final installment of “Making the Print-Digital Transition,” Newsosaur Alan Mutter offers a list of things the newspaper industry needs to do now if it is to regain financial well-being.

In his previous posts, Mutter looked at why newspapers need their print editions, especially if they want to build an online following of readers and advertisers.

Now, the Newsosaur provides a get-well-soon recipe:

Newspapers aren't dead, part 2

Ah, much food for thought today. In his ongoing look at the transition from print to digital, Alan Mutter points out that traffic to newspaper sites is derived largely from readers of the print product:

One of the biggest reasons to question the potential for standalone newspaper sites has been identified by Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive, who since 2001 has polled 300,000 newspaper website users in 250 markets across the country.

In his work, Harmon has discovered quite consistently that fully two-thirds of the visitors to newspaper sites say they visited the site because they are readers of the print newspaper.

Jeff Jarvis — BuzzMachine guru, noted “Blog Daddy” and author of What Would Google Do? — thanks Mutter for doing the math, but offers this counterpoint:

Some papers simply cannot afford the cost of print now and so they’d better figure out life post-print or there won’t be any.

Not entirely irreconcilable positions, both with something important to say about the state of media today. Let’s revisit one of Steve Yelvington’s assertions, which inspired this post: