Three items:
Forbes reports that the long-standing Morton-Groves Newspaper Newsletter is shutting down:
“I’m getting tired of producing painful forecasts,” Groves said Tuesday. “Recently, as down as they get to be, they never seem to be down enough.”
More to the point, the industry’s ongoing consolidation has robbed the newsletter of too many subscribers to continue publishing, he said. Most of those who paid the newsletter’s $500 annual subscription fee were executives at newspaper companies.
“Our base is eroding,” Groves said. “As those corporate jobs disappear, our subscriber base disappears.”
Hitwise’s UK-based Heather Hopkins does an interesting audience segmentation analysis of online vs. offline newspaper readers comparing the readership and online audiences of the top 5 UK newspaper sites. She finds that the online reach of three of the publications is much broader than its offline audience.
(From Adotas) McClatchy experienced a 5%+ ad revenue loss but online is growing.
As online newspaper ad revenue grows for publishers, online verticals and classifieds become more and more important. While the newspapers own leading verticals they don’t own a “horizontal” classifieds platform or destination.
The Yahoo! consortium (“Amigos”) has a version of that in Yahoo! but it’s not exactly the same as owning the asset yourself.
Screenwerk 