Most newspapers continue to be profitable, despite the issues that you read about. The question many may be asking today is how long can they hold on? PriceWaterhouseCoopers has issued its Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2009-2013 and predicts an advertising turnaround in 2011 for the publishing industry. Even then it is not good news. Writing in his Paid Content blog, Rafat Ali quoted the following from the forecast:

• Four segments - recorded music, B2B publishing, newspapers, and consumer magazines - will suffer actual declines in total global revenues during 2009-2013 as a whole, in stark contrast to CAGR in excess of 6 percent in Internet access, Internet advertising, video games, and TV subscriptions and license fees, and of 4 percent in filmed entertainment, which will become an increasingly digitally-driven segment.


• Advertising revenues as a whole are facing a period of broad decline over the coming five years, with global advertising spend across all media projected to be still below its 2008 level in 2013. This means a "profound structural shift during the five years towards more targeted and cost-effective ad models enabled by digital. This in turn may result in a permanent reduction in total advertising spend, as dollars formerly 'wasted' through inaccurate targeting are saved and reallocated to other priorities," says the report.

It may sound odd that space on a low-tech newsletter could be desirable in an age of mass-market blogs, when young people increasingly rely on instant messaging, texts, and such sites as Twitter and Facebook instead of e-mail. But remember that signing up for and opening an e-mail newsletter is a much bigger commitment than passively clicking on a link that takes you to a blog post, notes Sarah Lacy in an article for BusinessWeek.com. One publisher she mentions commands $40 per 1,000 views of some newsletter ads. Newsletters likely won't keep large media enterprises afloat, but a carefully produced (for example, local content of value - not selling), well-targeted (opt-in - not spam) digest could mean near-term revenue, she says. Publishers can see how many people open an e-mail, how long they read it, and how many friends they forward it to. Advertisers eat up that kind of engagement.

"Easy to use" was one of the traits Jack Shafer found distinctive to the few Web sites he could cite as having found success with the fee-for-access model. Writing for Slate this week, Shafer said all share at least one of the following: "1) They are so amazing as to be irreplaceable. 2) They are beautifully designed and executed and extremely easy to use. 3) They are stupendously authoritative." Media Management Center researchers have heard the "easy to use" phrase for years. MMC associate Stacy Lynch offers some help on deciphering what that means in a blog post and her recent Web Favorite and Easy to Use studies for the Center.

The Yahoo advertising platform developed in partnership with nearly 500 newspapers may be able to reach 80 percent of online users in a geographic area, versus the 20 percent or less typically delivered by a single newspaper's Web site, an exec for the search engine told The Palm Beach Post. The network relies on behavioral targeting, sending users information on products they've recently browsed for online. For those concerned with privacy, Yahoo allows opt-outs. What do newspapers bring to the game? A local sales force.

Traditionally, a handful of blue-chip brands have dominated the commercials supporting the Academy Awards, the second-biggest TV event after the Super Bowl. But the New York Post reports some of the regulars have cut back or taken a pass altogether due to factors associated with the U.S. economic crisis. Some advertisers may fear a consumer backlash against big spenders, others are being circumspect after accepting federal bailout bucks. The slack demand has led ABC to reportedly cut the price of a single 30-second spot by up to $400,000. Some advertisers still in the lineup say they'll go with retreads rather than debut new spots.

Cuts in newspaper budgets might suggest a substantially depleted Washington press corps, but a new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism shows the corps is not so much smaller as it is dramatically transformed. While representation by mainstream media has declined, a new sector of niche media coverage has grown. These reporters produce more specialized articles, and for more narrowly targeted and often elite audiences. Also, the number of reporters representing foreign media has grown to nearly 10 times the size it was a generation ago. The number of newspapers accredited to cover Congress has fallen by two-thirds as compared to the 1980s. The number claiming a presence in Washington generally, according to capitol directories, has fallen by more than half.

The New York Times has been exposing more data to external websites and applications recently, and now provides the ability to search the Times' entire online article archive of 2.8 million items going back to 1981. A post at VentureBeat.com explains The Times is doing so through application programming interfaces (APIs), which let third-party company developers access the data easily. For now, there's no charge to access the data, although the terms of service leave the possibility open.