Newspapers Have Not Hit Bottom, Analysts Say

Despite some tentative optimism from Washington, Wall Street and Madison Avenue, people who monitor the newspaper business for a living say it has not yet hit bottom. But in what passes for good news these days, the free fall in newspaper advertising may be slowing, and specialists predict it will ease through 2009 and into 2010. With 10 days left in the third quarter, analysts, publishers and ad buyers say that ad revenue will be down about 25 percent industrywide from the third quarter last year, possibly a little less. They predict that the decline will be smaller in the fourth quarter. Several of them say the usual back-to-school uptick in newspaper advertising seems to have been a little better than in most years, if only because July and August were so weak. Ordinarily, such numbers would be seen as catastrophic, but these times are not ordinary. The drop in combined print and digital ad revenue last year, 16.6 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America, was the worst since the Depression. But it looks rosy next to 2009, when revenue fell 28.3 percent in the first quarter and 29 percent in the second.