I sent this to some of my newspaper buddies today, but I’ll link it here as well.
Michael Silence of the Knoxville News Sentinel posted a memo from the Senior Vice President Mark Contreras of Scripps.
Here’s a snippet:
You’ve no doubt read about recent challenges in the newspaper business. We’re certainly not immune to many of these trends.
In the first quarter of this year, our total revenues were down 7.8% compared to last year, our expenses were down slightly, and our profit was down 28%. Many of our industry peers posted similar results. While online revenue remained strong (up 20%), total ad revenue fell due to classified advertising declines at our larger papers, as well as some softness in retail advertising.
The long and the short of it is that any business that has declining revenues and sharply declining profits must do something about it.
Two questions come to mind: how did we get here and what are we going to do about it?
How did we get here?
In short, the newspaper business has delivered solid revenue growth for decades. Despite the development of competing alternative media – such as radio, broadcast television, cable television and others – we adapted to changing consumer and advertiser behavior and still found ways to consistently grow.
There’s more there. Interesting stuff. The comments are interesting as well. You might want to go give it a gander.
on May 10th, 2007 at 9:58 am
I was going to send this to you. Great minds….