Vestiges of times lost

Total print and online newspaper advertising revenues plummeted to $8.92 billion in Q3 2008, an 18% drop of nearly $2 billion from Q3 2007, and a 6.9% drop from Q2 2008, according to figures released by the Newspaper Association of America, MarketingCharts reports.

The steep declines affected every type of newspaper advertisingin both print and online categories. Overall, print advertising has reached an historic low, slipping 19.26%, to $8.19 billion in Q3.

The largest percentage drop in any one print category was in classified advertising, which dove 30.85% to $2.36 billion.

National advertising experienced an 18.42% decline, to 1.36 billion, and retail - which accounts for nearly 50% of the ad-revenue pie, fell 11.72% to $4.47 billion.

Online advertising, which many industry-watchers hope will fuel future newspaper growth, experienced a more modest decline, but still fell 3% to $749 million. Q3 was the second consecutive quarter in which online ad revenues fell. In Q2 2008, online ad sales slipped 2.4%.

Last week Managing Editor Robert Thomson of the Wall Street Journal forecast a resurgence of newspaper advertising as big brands, chilled by economic woe, return to more familiar models.

Advertisers will pursue more "conservative, comfortable outlets to make their case to buyers," Thomson stated at the Reuters Media Summit in New York, and will spend money where success has been repeatedly demonstrated. He also said newspapers provide less distraction than the internet, where ads must compete with a panoply of other audiovisual media.

Thomson's statements appear to defy conventional perspectives of the state of the industry. A recent report by Fitch Ratings, for example, finds "several cities" in the States will be without a daily newspaper as soon as 2010.

Total newspaper revenues have fallen every quarter since Q3 2006.