“Print advertising has been declining for ten straight quarters, but this marks only the second quarter that online advertising also went down. More concerning is that the overall rate of decline seems to be accelerating, a trend we noted in September.”

What’s amazing to me is to see that online ad sales have leveled off from the 30-percent per year gains to under 20 and falling. In my experience, this is more about the incompetence of newspaper online ad sales efforts once the low hanging fruit got picked clean.

Here is the percentage change in total newspaper advertising for the past five quarters:

3Q07: -7.4%
4Q07: -10.3%
1Q08: -12.85%
2Q08: -15.11%
3Q08: -18.11%

Phone calls from customers will now be answered by employees of APAC Customer Services Inc. at its three call centers in Quezon City and Muntinlupa City. According to the DBJ, “APAC employs about 4,000 “accent-neutral,” English-speaking operators who take calls about subscriptions, delivery problems and billing and then relay the information back to the client for action, according to reports on the deal in the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Philippine Star.

“APAC already offers customer service for nearly 80 U.S. newspapers. Call centers for offshore clients are a booming business in the Philippines.”

This news was found in the email from the Bay Area newspaper guild organizing committee newsletter. They’ve filed with the NLRB to establish the union among the BANG-EB newspapers, including, the Contra Costa Times