Five of the nations largest newspaper companies are in talks to create their own advertising network in hopes of recapturing ad revenue that hasn’t been made the leap from their print products to their web offerings. The consortium will create a common ad sales force to help compete against ad networks set up by Yahoo (which many of the newspapers use). The companies in talks include Gannett Co., Tribune Co., Hearst Corp., Media News Group and Cox Newspapers. They would like to bring in the Washington Post Co. and McClatchy Co. in the near future and Gannett, Tribune have already said no.
In other newspape industry news, circulations continue to drop. The latest report puts industry-wide the drop at almost 3 percent compared to this time last year. Many major papers are reporting no significant change in print or online readership.
And lastly, not a specific newspaper story, but potentially impactfuly is the news that 80% of adults are going online and spending an average 11 hours a week on the web. Now if we can only get them to spend a large chunck of that time reading comics – that would be significant.