Ads Falling, the "Dailies" Ponder Reducing Days

After flying across the country on my birthday in 2000, from Silicon Valley, where I’d just inked a new job, to my home in suburban Washington, D.C., I was shocked to discover that my (extremely modest) net worth had just taken a one-day hit on a scale — ten-fifteen percent — that I’d never before experienced, and certainly hadn’t anticipated.

A year later, with the wreckage of Dot.Bomb 1.0 all around, the smoldering ruins of the company I had relocated west to join were awaiting distribution by a bankruptcy court. The main memory I have from that era is cursing myself for having not sold off all those toxic holdings back at the first hint of trouble.

Today, the first day of the last month of this momentous year in the media industry, it’s a bit of deja vu all over again. Of course, on a personal level, most of us have already lost a substantial portion of our retirement savings (again), and we’re worried about our jobs (again), and today’s markets crashed upon the “news” that the national economy has been officially declared to be in a recession (definition — three straight quarters of contraction.)

Those of us trying to create new business models for the media industry now face a challenge that is order of magnitude more difficult than it would have been had the online sector been able to escape the fate befalling the larger economy, but alas, that is not how things work. Some of the key indicators in the past week give a hint of what is to come.

The Newspaper Association of America issued yet another gloomy report on advertising revenue last week. For Q-3, the industry experienced a staggering 18.1 percent drop. Online ad revenue fell for the second straight quarter, by 3 percent.

The day before that report, a marketing research outfit, eMarketer, slashed its estimate for online ads in 2009 by 10 percent over its previous forecast just three months earlier.

Meanwhile, as bad as the news to date may be, it still sorta feels like that birthday of mine eight years ago. Everything could still get a lot worse. After all, none of the figures on the books yet capture the fourth quarter, when most of the damage in the stock markets and elsewhere in the economy has occurred. Alan D. Mutter reports that many newspapers are considering eliminating some of their daily editions — Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are the low ad days — if true, a new wrinkle in the already established trend of layoffs, reduced pages, more layoffs, eliminating sections. One Florida paper even has cut down its page size.

Will we soon witness the end of “daily” part of the daily newspaper, at least in print form? Maybe. Then, whatever happens to those institutions, how can those of us working online survive a Dot.Bomb.2?