According to a New York Times report, "now that advertising is back, some of it won’t be. In the same week whenGoogle and Yahoo found new traction in a reviving global advertising market, newspapers companies like McClatchy, Media General and The New York Times had to cut their way to earnings targets because display advertising, both in print and on the Web, is not coming back in the same way. The Times’sAbout.com, along with aggressive cost control, helped the company beat expectations by a wide margin. But the issue of cyclical (how big the ad pie is) versus secular (how big the slice of pie is) seemed to be settled. As pure digital plays started hiring, more print-oriented enterprises adjusted to a new (and apparently diminished) normal. The Times announced on Monday that it would offer buyouts, and failing that, layoffs, of 100 newsroom employees because changes in ad buying were going off during the whole down cycle in overall spend.
2. The consumer is going to end up participating in the next content epoch on the Web. The Wall Street Journal announced that it would offer a premium service, WSJ Pro, that will clock in at about $49 dollars a month for a service with a real-time data feed of six core industries utilizing both Dow Jones and Factiva content, and 30-plus industry topic pages. Newsday, which is owned by Cablevision, will begin charging nonsubscribers $5 a week. And although no one knows what The New York Times will do in terms of charging — Decoder has no home team advantage here — it was clear that some form of consumer participation on the Web will be part of the newspaper’s future. After all, for the first time in the company’s history, subscription revenue surpassed advertising revenue. As Richard Pérez-Peña reported, circulation revenue reached $175.2 million in the third quarter, while ad revenue dropped to $164.5 million.
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