Gannett report suggests newspaper industry will lose more than $1 billion in advertising this year

By the third quarter, the revenue picture for the newspaper industry is pretty well set. Now that the Newspaper Association of America has stopped compiling quarterly results, we need to look to public company reports for a proxy. And Gannett, which owns 81 community newspapers and USA Today, is representative all by itself. So I will hazard an informed guess that Gannett’s earnings report, which showed advertising losses of 5.3 percent so far, indicates that the industry will again lose more than $1 billion in advertising year-to-year in 2013. The math adds up to yet another disappointing year. Total ads are falling at a slightly lower rate (5.3 percent compared to 2012′s 6.8 percent). Digital ads will be up again but not nearly enough to cover the print losses.