DesertFox
06-25-2007, 11:09 AM
Thomas Lifson
I have been covering the failure of Pinch Sulzberger's business strategy, as documented in its latest earnings report, showing what the PR release called a "9.1% decline" in advertising revenue at the Times Media Group. But it now appears that this number might disguise as much as it shows, hiding a much more serious decline in print advertising revenue.
At Yahoo Finance, a very interesting analysis by Scott Karp uses the company's published data to estimate the annual rate at which the actual print advertising revenue is declining, and finds:
May 2006 to May 2007, print ad revenue for the News Media Group decline[d] $19.2 million or 14.4%, dwarfing the $2.8 million increase in online ad revenue. Not a great advertising trend ratio.
Over a year ago, Jack Risko and I undertook a similar analytical process of pulling together numbers from a variety of company reports to calculate the decline in the metropolitan New York print editions of the Times, historically the highly-profitable core of the company. We found that despite the rosy rhetoric, the local paper version of the Times has been in a severe long term decline (which is the reason the Company is shutting down a comparatively new large printing plant in New Jersey and laying off skilled blue collar workers) as a legacy of the stewardship of Pinch.
More (http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/06/nyt_print_advertising_decline.html)
I have been covering the failure of Pinch Sulzberger's business strategy, as documented in its latest earnings report, showing what the PR release called a "9.1% decline" in advertising revenue at the Times Media Group. But it now appears that this number might disguise as much as it shows, hiding a much more serious decline in print advertising revenue.
At Yahoo Finance, a very interesting analysis by Scott Karp uses the company's published data to estimate the annual rate at which the actual print advertising revenue is declining, and finds:
May 2006 to May 2007, print ad revenue for the News Media Group decline[d] $19.2 million or 14.4%, dwarfing the $2.8 million increase in online ad revenue. Not a great advertising trend ratio.
Over a year ago, Jack Risko and I undertook a similar analytical process of pulling together numbers from a variety of company reports to calculate the decline in the metropolitan New York print editions of the Times, historically the highly-profitable core of the company. We found that despite the rosy rhetoric, the local paper version of the Times has been in a severe long term decline (which is the reason the Company is shutting down a comparatively new large printing plant in New Jersey and laying off skilled blue collar workers) as a legacy of the stewardship of Pinch.
More (http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/06/nyt_print_advertising_decline.html)