Newspapers continued their slide in the third quarter of 2007, with 9% less advertising going to print.  While most newspapers added web properties to their portfolio in the last few years, that has not been enough to offset the losses in the print section.Newspaper classified ad sections suffered some of the worst losses, with that portion down 17%.  The three largest areas of the classifieds sections are:

Real Estate - The weak housing market has only added to the hurt of real estate companies shifting advertising to more interactive forms of advertising.

Cars - The outlook for car sales is lower than last year, and add on top of that the fact that most dealers realize newspaper ads don’t work as well for car sales as they used to.

Jobs - The continued dominance of online job sites, such as Monster.com, as well as the increase in recruiting done through social networking sites like FaceBook and MySpace have led to a drop in job ads being placed in newspapers.  Additionally, a small effect of the rising trend of work being performed remotely is starting to lower the usefulness of the local wanted ads.

On a related note, we can see in the Newspaper Association of America’s (NAA) chart of newspaper circulation that the total amount of newspapers consumed have taken a very substantial hit since last year.

The important takeaway from this is that in the world of media, not only are newspapers suffering falling circulation numbers, but even taking into account their online efforts newspapers are losing in the online media game.  Perhaps because of:

- The large number of media choices consumers have online.
- The relative lack of quality in site design & social sharing features.
- Some have tried to charge for access to content, in a medium that doesn’t respond well to paying to see content.
- They are violating the rules I discussed in my post titled The “Sharp Knife Through Soft Butter” Marketing Technique.

If you want to take a closer look at the NAA’s reports, here is the helpful link:

http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-Expenditures.aspx