Morning News Results: Down $93M in Two Years
A.H. Belo filed its 10K with a breakout of revenue results. The good news: in 2008 circulation price increases brought in nearly $10M more in revenues to $81M, which tells me someone wants a printed newspaper and is willing to pay for it. The bad news you can read for yourself after the jump:
Twelve Months Ended              2008             Change             2007             Change             2006
Advertising                        $ 300,099              (18.1 )%     $ 366,516            (9.8 )%     $ 406,515
Circulation                            80,097               14.0 %         70,244               (0.3 )%        70,445
Other                                     24,018               16.3 %         20,658              (1.3 )%        20,927
Net operating revenues       404,214              (11.6 )%      457,418              (8.1 )%        497,887
Isn’t this the same company that paid the CEO a 10.7 million dollar bonus last year?
I think that says it all.
Just goes to show…management paints the stripes down the road. If they elect to run the stripes off a cliff…
It’s all an illusion. You never see the heirs at a pawnshop or rolling a cart down the aisle at Target or Sam’s.
Newspapers are dead on arrival due to
changing times. Newspapers are for the old people.
The muckety-mucks at BELO probably can’t turn their computers on without an assistant.
It’s not about survival of newspapers. It’s about the survival of news and reporting what’s happening. Let’s face it blogs are often reporting what newspapers reported. Newspapers must survive in another medium. What that will be, who knows.
Maybe that huge bonus should be returned, like the AIG bonuses.
Not surprising. When the management teams of newspapers experienced auction sites in the min-nineties, they buried their heads in the sand and refused to claim their share of the new market. Instead of embracing the new technology, they feared losing classified revenue to ebay. Why did they do that?
An ad in print is assumed to be read by X number of people. When I was in the business, it was widely touted as 3.4 readers per copy, allowing the sales department to sell that great readership. And, for the most part, advertisers can’t select a certain zip code to target their ad (except for inserting post cards, etc). When you sell an online ad, you can cap that at a certain number of impressions, meaning the advertiser can spend less money, in a smarter way.
Now that the newspaper execs have shied away from the new ad methods for so long, they cannot shift the same amount of revenue to their online products. They made their beds, now they have to sleep in them.
re: “classified advertising revenue decreased $37,394, or 31.8 percent”
Google: “You’re welcome.”