On The Record - Newspaper Industry News

Newspaper Ads Help Drive Consumers to the Web

Here is an article that points out how an ad in the newspaper drives traffic to the web.

Some 44 percent of people who saw a product or service advertised in a newspaper in the past month researched it - and two-thirds (67 percent) of that group went online to find more information (see chart), according to a Google-commissioned survey from Clark, Martire & Bartolomeo, writes MarketingCharts.

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Parade President: Reports of Death of Papers May Be Greatly Exaggerated

Innovations Could Still Allow Them to Reverse Their Fortunes

By Randy Siegel

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- According to the pundits and prognosticators, newspapers are in a death spiral and doomed to extinction, just like the dinosaurs.

But what if these wags are wrong? What if newspaper companies reinvent themselves, innovate aggressively and discover new ways to increase revenue and market share? What if -- to paraphrase Mark Twain, who once read his own premature obituary -- reports of the death of newspapers are greatly exaggerated?

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NNA: Facts and Figures

I saw this interesting list of Facts and Figures when I was visiting the NNA website.  I think it is telling that 91% of community newspaper readers are registered to vote.  Maybe someone needs to let Obama and McCain in on that snippet!

Click here for the NNA's Facts and Figures

Read the Fine Print: Smaller Newspapers Still Thriving

We don’t read much good news about newspapers in general.  This article shines some light on smaller papers and how they are doing better than some would think:

Amid all the dire talk of falling revenues at big newspaper publishers, some good news gets lost: Many smaller operations are doing quite nicely--even during an economic downturn. Above all, smaller newspapers are benefiting from their still-unchallenged ability to deliver local audiences for local advertisers.

There's no question that small-town daily newspapers are faring better than most regional and national papers, which tend to dominate the headlines...

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American Newspapers and the Internet: Threat or Opportunity?

Here is a great article that I found that discusses how the internet may be helping newspapers recover their readers rather than hurting them...

We have recently completed the 2007 study of America's top 100 newspaper websites, entitled "American Newspapers and the Internet; Threat or Opportunity?". As the newspaper industry continues to suffer declines in readership and circulation, using the Internet to expand a newspaper's reach is becoming more and more important. While many industry experts fear that the Internet will spell the end of newspapers as we know them, our team here at TBG feels that the Internet presents newspapers with a unique opportunity to make up for lost circulation and readership.

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World's Editors Weigh in On Future of Newspapers

Some insight on the Newspaper industry’s efforts to embrace digital can be found on this NAA “Future of Newspapers” blog...

A survey conducted by Zogby International for the World Editors Forum and Reuters indicates that editors “remain confident about a mixed-media future and have quietly got on with the business of integrating their newsrooms," but this is "tempered by anxiety that newspapers are not investing enough in recruitment and training for the future," according to World Editors Forum president George Brock...

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