It has been awhile since I checked in on Lost Remote. I've been missing out. There were a number of interesting posts. Lost Remote focuses on "Local Media and the battle for the web."
Very depressing local media predictions quotes Dianne Mermias as saying:
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Major advertisers such as automotive, financial services, retail and real estate will not return any time soon; they will be diminished and different when they rebound a year from now. That is a disaster for local media, which could easily see more than half their ad revenue base wiped out in 2009.
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Wow, wow, wow! That would be huge. Major advertisers are cutting back because of the current economic conditions, and they are choosing to spend their advertising dollars more and more online. This means local televisions and newspapers will suffer. Dianne believes that one broadcast network will completely disappear.
Later on Lost Remote is Detroit papers cutting home delivery to 3 days each week:
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Both Detroit daily papers, the Free Press and The Detroit News, say they’re making a big change come March. They’ll only throw the hard copy to the doorstep on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays.
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And later in the same post:
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The Christian Science Monitor recently said it will kill its print edition in April and the Capital Times in Madison dumped its print edition earlier this year. The real question for the Detroit papers–which both lost subscribers over the past year–is whether this will keep them in business long-term.
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This ties in with a post by Jeff Jarvis who is collecting statistics on the state of the news business. In Bad news, good news he writes about the stats he has so far. Here are a few:
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Newspaper stocks fell an average of 83.3% in 2008—twice the fall of the S&P 500—wiping out $64.5 billion in market value, according to Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog.
Since 1994—and the release of the commercial web browser—newspaper audience penetration has fallen a third, from 23% to 16%. In that time, circulation fell 14% (59 million to 50 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America) while population rose 20%.
Viewership for network evening news continues to decline, to 23.1 million in 2007, according to Nielsen. The median age of network evening news viewers is 61 in 2008, according to Magna Global USA.
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That last statistics is just amazing. As the current views of the evening news die off, the evening news might end up going away. (If you have any money invested in newspapers you might want to reconsider.)
We are living in transitory times. Even the way we get news is changing.
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