“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%

By Pat Keeble
Editor, contracostainsider.com

I wonder if Dean Lesher, for whom I worked for 27 years, would understand what’s going on at the Contra Costa Times and its sister papers, which he started and owned for so long. He would do lay-offs every two or three years or so.

We’d say, “he must need money” and in due time he’d announce he was building a new printing plant in North Concord or buying into the Walnut Creek Regional Arts Center. And in a year or so we’d be back up to strength.

But he never gutted the paper. It was a matter of saving a little money, and at the same time maybe let the editors delete a few of the lesser staff. We didn’t have a union so we had no protection whatsoever from economic cutbacks. But it always came back.

What’s going on now, combined with what else is going on in the newspaper business, is a comparative slaughterhouse. With the News Media merger, gobbling up Bay Area papers  and adding to numerous mergers around the country in recent years, the news window is narrowing. Fewer newspapers, featuring “combined” coverage by fewer reporters, are not replacing today’s news with better news. It’s eliminating news, particularly local news, that is not being replaced by other media.

The new organization has invited the employees of all the papers to apply for a buy-out or risk being fired. In such cases, the experienced (and higher paid) journalists are the first to go. Coverage gets “combined” as newspapers merge. Fewer voices are presented.

One wonders where the future’s trained, professional journalists will come from and how they will be paid. Recently a newspaper editor reported on his discussion with a college journalism class. He and they thought the web was the future of news. But the students also thought, vehemently, that the web should be free to readers. Advertising pays the costs of putting out a print paper, but only an average of 3-5 percent of newspaper websites. Yet these students expected to make a living working for webpapers.

Newspapers are losing readers and money hand-over-fist.  The web is where it’s at, they say. Then they wonder why newspapers’ websites don’t take off.

Because it’s not the same thing. The websites haven’t been able to make the ad money that the newspapers can make, no matter how many flashing pop-up ads they put on.

Newspapers will survive in some form or another, for awhile, anyway. New readers will be found as they rediscover this thing that doesn’t need batteries and the hard drive never gets knocked out. One can spread out a page and see lots of things, including an ad that might catch the eye even though it doesn’t jump around all over the page.

News is essential to a living, breathing, supportive democracy. As much as people complain about the news media, we cannot do without it.  When have you read about a merger where it says “we’re going to do a better job of protecting our freedoms” as opposed to “we have to cut costs”?

Reporters are the messengers of democracy, and we’re killing them off, merger by merger.

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Pat Keeble is former Political Editor of Lesher Newspapers, Inc., now known as Contra Costa Newspapers, and is editor and publisher of her own online news site Contra Costa Insider.