Newspaper publishers, entering 2008 with some of the worst economic conditions in many years, said Wednesday that they hope to bring more readers — and ad spending — to their Web sites with expanded offerings of news, advertising and video.
The newspaper industry has been struggling as a dismal housing market weighs heavily on real estate and other types of print advertising.
As Donald Graham, chief executive of The Washington Post Co., put it: "2007 was not a good year for anybody in the newspaper business."
But Graham said his company was hopeful about expanding its audience online, particularly as the 2008 presidential election approaches. He said that should play to the Post's strengths in political reporting.
At McClatchy Co., the nation's third-largest newspaper publisher by circulation, CEO Gary Pruitt said the company's online advertising growth was "stunted" in 2007 partly because of one-time factors such as changes to the company's agreement with CareerBuilder, a recruitment advertising network co-owned by Gannett Co. and Tribune Co.
People are also reading…
The executives were speaking at a conference sponsored by UBS.
Chris Hendricks, McClatchy's head of online operations, called the company's 0.8 percent growth in online ad revenue in the year-to-date period through October "disappointing," but said McClatchy was optimistic about converting more of its online traffic into ad dollars next year. In October, he noted, unique visitors to McClatchy Web sites jumped 23 percent over the same month a year ago, to 21 million.
Sue Clark-Johnson, chief of the newspaper division at Gannett Co. — the No. 1 newspaper publisher and publisher of the Tucson Citizen and The Arizona Republic — said the company saw a strong correlation between regional slumps in housing and declines in advertising. Gannett's newspapers in Arizona, Nevada, California and Florida accounted for 28 percent of the company's newspaper revenue and 48 percent of the declines, she said.
Online, Gannett was far more optimistic, Clark-Johnson said. She said Gannett-owned newspaper Web sites were on track to post a 32 percent gain in page views this calendar year.
Gannett's flagship USA Today, meanwhile, is expected to report a decline of between 6 percent and 7 percent in revenue this year versus last year, more than half of which resulted from a sharp drop in automotive advertising.