The good news is, according to a report commissioned by the Newspaper Association of America, that traffic at web sites of the nation's newspapers is growing faster than overall internet traffic. The bad news is print newspaper sales are tumbling. The worse news is, according to an article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal(subscription required), most newspapers won't be able to sustain their business off of internet advertising. The Nielsen/NetRatings study found that traffic at newspaper sites in the first quarter of 2007 was up 5.3% over a year ago, to a monthly average of 59 million visitors. However, recent NAA figures for print sales in the last half of 2006 show an overall decline in dailies readership of 2.1%, a loss of a million readers over the previous year. Sunday editions declined even more steeply, dropping 3.1%.
A timely opinion piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, by Walter E. Hussman Jr. of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, compared his paper's approach to marketing online content to that of my hometown rag, the Columbus Dispatch. The Democrat-Gazette sells a subscription to access the on-line version of its paper, while the Dispatch's content, once also sold by subscription, is now free. It has chosen to make its money off advertising.
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