Or is that a train loaded with unused newsprint rushing full speed ahead at us?
Three promising signs indicate that possibly, maybe, perhaps the newspaper industry is finally starting to break free from the bottom, where it has been mired for many, many months.
Those signs:
1. The New York Times reports that The Seattle Times, the city’s surviving newspaper after the rival Post-Intelligencer closed its print operation several months ago, is in black ink. With the P-I’s closing, The Times circulation jumped 30 percent, from 200,000 to 260,000, in June. And at the P-I, a Web-only operation now, owner Hearst says things are going better than expected, with audience and revenue better than forecast.
2. Gordon Borrell, a long-time observer of the newspaper industry and head of Borrell Associates, is forecasting a “mild rebound” for local newspapers in 2010, perhaps a 2.4 percent increase in advertising. Borrell reports that smaller newspapers “are firmly entrenched in their niche of providing rich local content that people seem to prefer in print – rather than screen – format.” That matches the thinking in corporate conference rooms three years ago when the bottom started to fall out. Then the only solace was a belief that at least the small to medium size newspapers would weather the building storm. Borrell suggested we all might want to remember his forecast and take a look one year from today.
Good stuff, but not yet time to uncork the champagne bottle.
Newspapers face a very tough road, and so far the attempts at righting the ship have come mostly from slash and burn cost-cutting over the last 12 months. Not much room or time to innovate or invent “the new model.”
But now newspapers are in Phase 2: trying to publish a quality print product, while moving forward on the digital front and trying to woo advertisers back.
Any one of those alone is a tall order in good times; an amazing challenge when staff ranks are depleted and morale is down.
But as Yogi Berra and Lenny Kravitz agree, “It ain’t over till it’s over.”
And these three reports seem to indicate it ain’t over.
As a pal/editor at the Palm Beach Post says: Onward.