CHICAGO-- Newspaper and newspaper groups are likely to default on their debt and go out of business next year -- leaving "several cities" with no daily newspaper at all, Fitch Ratings says in a report on media released Wednesday.
"Fitch believes more newspapers and newspaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010," the Chicago-based credit ratings firm said in a report on the outlook for U.S. media and entertainment.
Fitch is generally pessimistic across the board, assigning negative outlets to nearly all sectors from Yellow Pages to radio and TV and theme parks. But the newspaper industry is the most at risk of defaulting, it says.
"Much of the business risk for the media sector is likely to continue to be concentrated within the newspaper sub-sector," the report says. "Fitch expects newspaper industry revenue growth will be negative for the foreseeable future as both ad pricing and linage will be under pressure within each of the four main components of newspaper companies' revenue streams: circulation and local, classified and national advertising. Newsprint costs could rise, and it could be difficult to offset revenue declines with cost cuts."
Source: Editor & Publisher (read the article)
Commentary
More bad news for the Democrat Party Stenography Association. If papers focused on reporting news instead of the party line, they might do better. I have canceled all my newspaper subscriptions over the course of a few years because I perceived an unhealthy lefty stance, a laziness in reporting real news, local or national.
I think papers could still pull their fat out of the fire if they were to build their online activities to keep up with fast-breaking news, link more to other "non-newspaper sources" of information in the community and incorporate more ways of producing revenue streams from that content. I have some ideas, but it won't be for free.
Which reminds me...most of the local papers don't incorporate RSS Feeds to push content out the door to draw readers to their website...and those that do, have odd implementation.
Previously:
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1 comments :
Loved the toe tag photo TP! How very appropriate. And you could say, the newspapers shot themselves in the foot. :)
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