Everything on table as Winnipeg Free Press looks to cut costs

CBC reports (online) that the Winnipeg Free Press is working hard to cut costs. The poor old newspaper industry sure is in rough shape:

• Many of them are leveraged out the wazoo as they were bought with enormous debt (suddenly Conrad Black looks like he might have been smarter to get locked up in jail, then saddled with a newspaper empire)
• People are going online to get timely news that doesn't get your fingers dirty and smelly, and not picking up an outdated paper
• Advertising revenue is plumetting as advertisers chop budgets and look for better ways to get their messages out.

As one comment on the CBC site says:

"This is classic Darwin, the Media version.
Years ago, television killed radio and radio adapted.
Recently, digital cameras killed print film and Kodak adapted (barely).
Today, the Internet is killing print media, and print media had better adapt."

Ottawa Citizen removing more newspaper boxes

CBC.ca reports that the Ottawa Citizen is removing all of their newspaper boxes. Are they doing this because people really don't like to buy newspapers from a box anymore ... or because people really don't like to buy newspapers anymore?

One of the comments to the story is:

Why go to the trouble to remove the boxes? Because they're probably worth more as scrap metal to the publisher, than as the revenue generating devices they were originally designed to be.

Trends for 2009: #14. Traditional Print Media will continue to crater

I'm certainly not the first to forecast that newspaper and magazines are in rapid decline. According to eMarketer. The newspaper business model is broken and advertisers are bailing,

eMarketer forecasts that newspaper ad revenue will decline 16.4% in 2008, and dramtically further by 2012. On top of that circulation for newspapers continues to deteriorate as people hit the internet in greater numbers than ever before to get news, opinions, classifieds, and entertainment that are both timelier and free. Even worse for Traditional Print media - the high costs of production and distribution is not coming down.

I used to love the newspaper. Was there nothing better on a Saturday morning then to sip a hot coffee and thumb through the pages of the paper? Now there is. I brew my morning latte, and hop online for 20 minutes. I haven't had a subscription for years. In fact, this week I actually picked up a paper that someone else had left on a table in a Starbucks. That's the first one I've touched in months. The ironic thing is that I was attracted by a headline the trumpeted "TV Networks Closing Stations" (that will be a trend for another day).

Another piece of evidence came out this week when Google canceled it's print ad program. Google started the program in 2006, and by 2009 had 800 US newspapers participating in it. Reading between the lines, even Google couldn't make a buck in the dying print world.

So, what's a Marketer to do in 2009?

• Look carefully at the price and performance of all media - this includes the dying print world, the new interactive world, and everything in between. You never know ... you might find that for your particular product or service a newspaper ad still outperforms an interactive campaign. But, more than likely, that just means that you aren't yet doing the right things with your interactive campaign.
  
• Be sure that you have an exit plan for Traditional Print media. There are lots of newspapers going bankrupt and magazines that are shutting down. If you aren't doing interactive advertising, start now before it is too late for you to get the skills you will need to have to market well with new media.
  

Will I be right? The year will tell!

• Follow this blog and watch for the next marketing trends I'm forecasting for 2009.
• Feel free to contact Market GoGo to discuss this further.