Decline of US newspapers hits a milestone

American print ad revenues are down more than 50 per cent in the past five years. Photo / Thinkstock

Here's a quick reminder that, despite the upbeat story lines we've heard about the greater media business during the past year or so, most newspapers are still very much in free fall.

At the American Enterprise Institute's Carpe Diem blog, Mark J. Perry finds that print ad revenues are now the lowest they've been since 1950, when the Newspaper Association of America began tracking industry data.

Again, that's 1950, when the US population was less than half its current size and the economy was about one-seventh as big. Revenues are down more than 50 per cent in just the past five years alone.

"The dramatic decline in newspaper ad revenues since 2000 has to be one of the most significant and profound Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction in the last decade, maybe in a generation," Perry writes.

Read: Paid online subscribers help paper's profit

And yet, his data might actually understate the horror of last year's newspaper financials. The problem isn't simply that growing digital ad dollars can't replace disappearing print money fast enough; it's that digital ad revenue is barely growing at all.

And while circulation dollars are up, that growth is likely concentrated at national papers, like The New York Times, which have had success implementing pay walls for their websites.

The Gray Lady now has 799,000 online-only subscribers, which helped its first quarter rise year over year. But metro papers haven't had the same luck convincing their readers to pay. The San Francisco Chronicle, for instance, dropped its own pay wall after just four months.

So remember: While a handful of startups like Vox.com might be commanding the attention of media reporters these days, old-line newspapers are still bleeding revenue and cutting staff to the bone. It's not pretty. And it's not clear there's much to be done about it.

- Slate