I wouldn't blame the Bancroft family if they took some comfort today in knowing that the bleeding of Wall Street Journal's advertising revenues, which declined sharply in July, are News Corp's (NYSE: NWS) problem now. Murdoch seems to have his work cut out for him, too. The Dow Jones (NYSE:DJ) paper's ad revenues were down 7.2% for the month over 2006, on a decline in volume of 20.9%. For the year, ad revenues are off 4.6%. The company's Barron Magazine suffered an even great drop of 9.5%, but remains up 15.8% for the year.

The drop off is especially foreboding given that the WSJ's digital edition ad sales revenue grew a whopping 24%, but still did not completely offset the shortfall in the tree-based edition. Technology ads declined the most, off over 75%, followed by classifieds, down 13.5%. Much of the classifieds drop is attributed to a decline in property for-sale ads, another casualty of the housing malaise. Strong ad sales in the financial sector helped soften the loss, though, up 21%.

The company's Ottaway Newspapers also lost advertising, down in ad revenue 16.5% for the month and 11.9% for the year.

The WSJ benefits from a strong circulation of over 2 million readers. Nonetheless, in 2006, 53.6% of Dow Jones' income came from advertising. Sharp, sudden loses are no way to please the new boss.

Advertising-supported content has become the dominant business model for the internet, as demonstrated by our (AOL, Time Warner, NYSE:TWX) recent change from a membership-based model. Advertising Age recently released its study of the 100 top advertisers and how they spend their advertising dollars. For all the brouhaha about the internet, traditional print advertising still dominates the marketing plans of the top corporations. A breakdown of 2006 expenditures by ad distribution platform shows --

1. Magazines -- $29.83 billion
2. Newspapers -- $29.80 billion
3. Network TV -- $27.16 billion
4. Spot TV -- $17.23 billion
5. Cable TV networks -- $16.75 billion
6. Radio -- $11.06 billion
7. Internet -- $9.75 billion
8. Syndicated TV -- $4.2 billion
9. Outdoor -- $3.83 billion

also see 2006 Advertising recap II- The big rollers

The alliance that Gannett Co. (NYSE:CCI), McClatchy Co. (NYSE:MNI) and Tribune Co. (NYSE:TRB) are reportedly going to form to court national advertisers to their Web sites would have been a better idea in 2002.

Advertisers like phone companies and car makers will get a one-stop shop to reach a national audience without the hassle of negotiating separate deals with individual papers through what the companies have dubbed "The Open Network," according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). {As an aside, can I make a plea to corporate america to stop the stupid code names.}

The question I have for the newspaper publishers is why they think the national advertisers will bother. They can reach much larger audiences through the portals like this one, Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq:MSFT) and Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:Yhoo), which has its own alliance with newspaper publishers. Plus, they have the option of using Google Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG) to promote their brands. Moreover, most of these publications -- with the exception of USA Today -- aren't national in nature.

About the only way this can work will be if the papers price these ads so low that the advertisers would be stupid not to give the Open Network a try instead of spending their money with either Dow Jones & Co. (NYSE:DJ) or the New York Times Co. (NYSE:NYT). That won't be easy.

As the Journal notes, newspapers haven't had much sucess in working together to sell national print ads. With all of the ad money shifting online, what makes them think this alliance will work better? There's big pressure on newspaper publishers to grow their online businesses, which will remain smaller than the print side for some time to come.

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