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Five Reasons Why Newspaper Industry Will Bounce Back — Seeking Alpha
This is a post from several weeks ago, but I wanted to blog it to keep track of it. Interesting predictions amid the usual doom and gloom.
The top five reasons why Borrell Associates thinks newspapers will rebound:
1. First in, first out: Newspapers were the first medium that the internet forced into a “period of adjustment,” and they will be the first to emerge from it after working their way up the learning curve.
2. Big papers took the hit: When the internet decimated classifieds and major retail, this affected the industry’s biggest papers which took the whole industry’s revenues down. However, the revenue decline has been much less severe for the majority of the US’s smaller newspapers. For these papers, Borrell expects growth to come from geographical targeting to a wide base of non-classified, non-department-store local advertisers. This will happen even as larger papers continue to experience layoffs, abbreviated publication schedules and outright closures in order to “right-size” themselves.
3. Newspapers selling smarter: After emerging from a long-time, complacent “comfort zone,” newspaper sales and marketing teams are evolving in earnest. They are becoming proactive about discovering and meeting customer needs, selling against the competition, and taking no client for granted, especially in local ad markets.
4. A rising tide lifts some boats more than others: As the country’s economy begins to improve in the latter part of this year, newspapers will capture a bit more of the resulting growth in ad spending than their current share. This will come in part from growth in pre-print and free-standing insert revenue from advertisers migrating out of direct mail. Additionally, the auto, real estate and recruitment sectors will resurge as the economy improves and some revenue will flow to newspapers.
5. Internet contributions: Beyond simply enduring the punch landed by the internet, newspapers are using the web to generate a significant portion of their revenues and profits. Although Borrell Associates counts newspaper online revenues as online rather than newspaper revenue, it forecasts that side of the business will begin to provide more support to the print side.
via Five Reasons Why Newspaper Industry Will Bounce Back — Seeking Alpha.