A lot of pixels have been spilt over the financial crisis that newspapers are now facing. Some of it has been triumphalist, some of it more in sadness than in anger (or joy).
Now, as Ecclesiastes says, there's, "a time to destroy, a time to gloat." OK, I made that part up. But the fact is that while new media may create the buzz, most issues are still ultimately validated by appearing in the MSM. Their brand-name appeal still carries a lot of weight, as demonstrated by their post-2004 counterattack against blogs. And the fact that their corrections sections pages compete only with their apologists ombudsmen in after-the-fact self-justification hasn't yet succeeded in destroying that brand-name.
So the financial condition of newspapers should still be of interest to us all. (They are, it would seem, at least of passing interest to their publishers. Although not of enough interest for the publishers to pay for the conference themselves. "The summit conference was enabled by a generous grant from the McCormick Foundation and funded by API's J. Montgomery Curtis Memorial Seminar Fund.")
Some of the gloating has come from talk radio and the right, on the assumption that the MSM's credibility gap is causing its financial difficulties. Maybe. But as one of the participants put it, "'We don't have a crisis of audience. We have a crisis of revenue' in monetizing that traffic."
Over the course of a series of articles, I'm going to look at the industry's financials, learning and revising as I go, trying to understand and explain what's happening to the newspaper industry, and why it's producing stock charts that look like the pre-Fed Bear Stearns:
