Newspapers Offer a Case for Keeping Them Around – New York Times
"Donald E. Graham, the chairman and chief executive of the Washington Post Company, said in a keynote address that the decline in print circulation and the growing migration of paid classified advertising to free Web sites like Craigslist are major problems facing the industry. "If Internet advertising revenues don’t continue to grow, I think the future of the newspaper industry will be very challenging," Mr. Graham said, adding that "Web ads work very, very well." But whether Internet ads are effective or not, L. Gordon Crovitz, the president of Dow Jones’s electronic publishing division, complained that current online ad rates are too low, saying advertisers have never before been able to reach a captive audience all day long with advertising messages. "This to me is the biggest issue," Mr. Crovitz said. "I don’t think any publisher has been getting fair value from advertisers." He added, "I think the challenge for all of us, and we take on this responsibility, is to do the hard work that’s necessary to keep informing advertisers of the value of online advertising."
Woo-hoo. You tell ’em boys, Mad. Ave. needs to get off of online discount mindset and start getting whacked with some rate increases. Nothing like sold out inventory and a messy print world to drive up CPMs.
