Through the third week in January, advertising pages at BusinessWeek are down 31%. At Entertainment Weekly, they are off 36%. Through their February issues, GQ and Gourmet's ad pages are off over 30%.
Today, the news came out that The New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT) is close to selling part of its building. It has already taken money from Carlos Slim, some of which comes with a 14% interest rate. The Times is now nearly out of options. It won't sell The Boston Globe which some experts believe is losing $1 million a week. That leaves the option of raising money by dumping assets out of the question.
The third largest newspaper chain in the US, McClatchy (NYSE:MNI) which has insisted it would be OK, now trades below $1.
Most of this has been written about before, but the numbers from print media that have come in during the last three days show that an industry which was in decline is in such a rapid decline that scores of newspapers and magazines will close over the next two or three months. Even a year ago, this was unimaginable.
The print media is something that most business people cannot imagine. It is an industry in trouble which cannot be fixed. Intelligence and hard work has no effect. The end of many of the world's greatest print brands are is in sight.
The bleeding was supposed to be slow enough so that there were be time to work on solutions.That opportunity is now well in the past.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 24/7 Wall St.
Nuclear power is on the comeback trail
Apple backs AT&T in continuing spat with Verizon
Closing Bell: The recession is still over, still... do you feel it?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-23-2009 @ 5:51AM
al coholic said...
"The end of many of the world's greatest print brands are is in sight."
The end of virtually all printing on paper is not that far off either.
1-23-2009 @ 7:27AM
Dan Barnett said...
Al,
So Farenheit 451 comes not with a bang, but with a pink slip?
1-23-2009 @ 8:23AM
beachpaul said...
Digitalization took the music business, with the help of short sighted, greedy, management and decimated it. Same with newspapers. Most are schills for special interests. They have become ad rag sheets, a waste of paper and ink. The internet is eliminating layers of middleman everywhere. Car dealers are obsolete. We should be able to buy cars directly from the manufacturer. Delaying, fighting, obstructing digitalization, the power of the internet, is what entrenched special interests have done in a vain attempt to hang onto their streams of money. We prolong the inevitable by "bailing" them out. But make no mistake about it, these businesses have already gone the way of the dinosaur.
1-23-2009 @ 9:39AM
TX CHL Instructor said...
The current economic woes have not caused the demise of the newspapers, it has just exposed their irrelevance.