THE MEDIACRACY

MEDIA MEETS THE MOUSE UPDATE

JOSEPH T. HALLINAN, WALL STREET - Auto ads, a major source of
newspaper-classified advertising, have been slipping steadily for nearly
two years. But the slippage may be turning into a landslide. Last week,
Tribune Co. said auto-classified revenue at its newspapers plunged 16%
in December. Also last week, Lee Enterprises Inc., publisher of papers
such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reported a 15.2% drop in auto
advertising for the fourth quarter. On Wednesday, McClatchy Co. reported
a 20% decline for December, saying the downturn in car ads had finally
reached its West Coast papers, the biggest of which is the Sacramento
Bee, in the heart of California's car culture. . .

The decline adds to the woes of the newspaper industry, already losing
circulation to the Internet. For years, fat sections of car ads were a
dependable source of business for newspaper publishers, accounting for
30% of the industry's total classified ad revenue of $16.6 billion in
2004, the last full year for which figures are available. Even as a
migration of job ads to the Internet took a big bite out of newspaper
employment classifieds from 2000 to 2003, auto ads held up. That began
to change in 2004. . .

"Dealers are finding Web ads generate strong responses. 'Eight out of 10
customers that walk into our dealership have already looked at our
website,' says Wes Lutz, who owns Extreme Dodge/Hyundai in Jackson,
Michigan. Demand from the Internet is so keen that three years ago he
designated a new position at his dealership: Internet manager. That
person's job is to reply to all Internet inquiries within an hour. "Mr.
Lutz still advertises with the local paper, but not nearly as much as he
did 10 years ago. 'They're just really antiquated,' he says. 'They're
just stuck in time.'"

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/
SB113832264071557673-e44vOT3ZvwSYZM41Gw5pxgXKMw8_20070126.html


WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM - Arthur Sulzberger Jr, Chairman and Publisher, The
New York Times, explained how the 154 year-old Times, and now the
International Herald Tribune as well, are no longer just print media
businesses with digital enterprises. The Web presence of the papers has
moved from being "ancillary"to being "core". The print version of the
Times still provides most of the revenue, however, despite the fact that
there are today more readers of the Web version. . . Sulzberger said
readers who might drift to aggregators at first would always come back
to the Times for quality news. The average reader of the daily version
of The New York Times is 43 years old; for the Sunday version, he or she
is 45. Sulzberger said that these numbers have not changed in a decade.
To him this indicates that teenagers may get their content from the
Internet, but when they begin to have to rely on information later in
life, they go to the Times.

http://www.weforum.org/site/knowledgenavigator.nsf/Content/
_S15496?open&event_id=1462&year_id=2006