Newspapers Hope for Online Growth in ’08
From the Associated Press:
Newspaper publishers, entering 2008 with some of the worst economic conditions in many years, said Wednesday they hope to bring even more readers – and ad spending – to their Web sites with expanded offerings of news, advertising and video.
The newspaper industry has been struggling as a dismal housing market weighs heavily on real estate and other types of print advertising.
As Donald Graham, CEO of The Washington Post Co., put it: “2007 was not a good year for anybody in the newspaper business.”
But Graham said his company was hopeful about expanding its audience online, particularly as the 2008 presidential election approaches. That, he said, should play to the Post’s strengths in political reporting as well as at the company’s online magazine, Slate.
At McClatchy Co., the nation’s third-largest newspaper publisher by circulation, CEO Gary Pruitt said the company’s online advertising growth was “stunted” in 2007 due partly to one-off factors such as changes to the company’s agreement with CareerBuilder, a recruitment advertising network co-owned by Gannett Co. and Tribune Co.
The executives were speaking at a conference sponsored by UBS.
Chris Hendricks, McClatchy’s head of online operations, called the company’s 0.8 percent growth in online ad revenue in the year-to-date period through October “disappointing,” but said McClatchy was optimistic about converting more of its online traffic into ad dollars next year. In October, he noted, unique visitors to McClatchy Web sites jumped 23 percent over the same month a year ago, to 21 million.
Certainly online is being taken more and more seriously at the Star, Daily Press and the rest of Freedom Communications. New-to-the-site features will be regularly added to the site (Hesperia Star readers can now upload their own videos, for instance) and a redesign may even be in the offing.
Still, it’s a long journey to the healthy and secure online future, and not every paper making the journey (especially those reluctant to make the trip at all) are going to make it to the end.
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