Like sands through the hourglass

The State of Newspapers? Think of Sand Falling in an Hourglass, Pew Report Says

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1004075082

In three years, newsrooms have shrunk 27 percent.

But when a blogger does the "Yay, we're killing newspapers!" bit. Point this out to them. — The authors' analysis of more than a million blogs and social media sites found that 80% of the links are to U.S. legacy media.

 

Somewhat surprised the percentage isn't bigger.

We've gone from a newsroom of 369 (at our peak) to 180.

About 135 of the 369 (36.5%) have occured in the past 3 years.

 

I thought this would be about the recent death of Frances Reid, the Horton family matriarch and last original cast member of "Days Of Our Lives."

 

We're down exactly 50% from two years ago in our newsroom and are barely hanging on.

I'm also surprised the number wasn't bigger than 27 percent.

 

The survey said that people don't pay attention to online ads because only 21 percents click on ads. But, let me ask you this what percentage of people click on a newspaper ad?

 

See I was thinking this was about "Days" too. I was going to come on and say it has nothing on TV's greatest soap "General Hospital".

 

This has me thinking constantly of the daunting challenges we face:

http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/threads/76672/

 

Newspaper ads provide tons of information (for me, anyway) about things I otherwise never would have sought elsewhere.

Renaissance Festival is in town? Saw an ad in the paper.

Monster fabric store having a 70% off sale. Saw ad in the paper. Didn't even know the store existed before I saw the ad.

And on and on.

Our Friday entertainment section is a great source of information (some editorial, but mostly ads) about things coming to or already performing in our area.

Cannot think of another "one-stop" place I would go to for that handy information.

 

Eye-track studies have found that as well as readers not clicking on ads, they don't even look at them. That's why ad servers push keyword links and story-looking text ads, and why pubs base a lot of their rates on ads served, not clicked.

 

Tee hee.