A canceled flight got me to the New York investors' media conference a day late, but I caught up with the Power Point of the opening forecast for the newspaper industry.
The good news, I guess, is that Newspaper Association of America Business Analyst Jim Conaghan expects advertising revenue to decline only 1.2 percent in 2008, compared to 7 percent this year. That is to say that online revenue growth, which he predicts at 22 percent, will not quite cover continued losses of revenue from classifieds.
Conaghan was overly optimistic in his view for 2007 a year ago (as were others), and his count of industry online ad growth in the 3rd quarter of 2007 is a good deal higher than what most public companies have been reporting. So, I see a bit of "best case" in the forecast.
He noted that the economy is expected to be somewhere between soft and sliding into recession. That won't help either.
Newspapers will try to make the sales pitch that their Web sites are the most credible place for online advertising. And as the Audit Bureau of Circulations changes to counting discounted copies as paid, new NAA research, Conaghan said, suggests that those readers and others who get copies paid for by third parties are only a bit less attentive than fully paid seven-day-a-week readers.
