Markets

It's the Best and Worst of "Times" in St. Petersburg

By David Weir

Updated on: May 30, 2008 / 5:18 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

It's been another of those weeks for the newspaper industry. Consider the schizophrenic messages that staffers at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times received.

The newspaper's online business and finance sections were rated as tied for the very best among the top 25 U.S. dailies with the far larger and richer New York Times.

But, management announced it will further reduce staff this year and impose a one-year wage freeze on those who remain. The paper has already reduced its staff by some 13 percent over the past two years.

Back to the good news. A financial news and opinion site, 24/7 Wall St., released its grades for the online business/finance sections at the 25 largest U.S. newspapers by circulation. The sites got ratings of "A" through "F" based on: 1) strength of content, 2) ease of use and navigation, 3) use of new web technology including comments sections, message boards, and multimedia 4) lay-out, and 5) possessing strong set of current advertisers.

(Two national newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, were excluded from this study.)

In awarding the St. Petersburg paper (which is only the 18th largest in circulation) one of its 2 "A"s, 24/7 Wall St. stated:

The financial section of the online edition of the St. Petersburg Times is remarkably well-done. The graphics and lay-out are as good as USA Today's. The interactive features on local companies are particularly well done. The site also has a very fine photo section, something lacking at most other online newspaper money sites. Contacting writers and posting comments are easy and intuitive.

The Times is the largest newspaper in Florida, and also one of the nation's most respected. It is published by the Times Publishing Company, which in turn is owned by the non-profit Poynter Institute, so theoretically the pressure to maximize profits should not be as great as at other newspaper companies.

Nevertheless, what is an exec at this kind of mid-sized media organization to conclude? "We're doing all the right things, but they're freezing our wages. When will this end?"
Not until at lest 2013. That's the conclusion Mark Potts reaches in an article in the upcoming issue of the American Journalism Review, entitled, "Bridging the Abyss: Why a Lot of Newspapers Aren't Going to Survive." That's the earliest year, according to his projections, that growing online advertising revenue will offset falling print advertising enough to allow some newspapers to once again become sustainable.

But others feel Potts' analysis is wildly optimistic. He based his projections on the assumptions that online revenue will grow at 20 percent, while print revenue will fall by only 5 percent per year. Recalibrate his numbers at a lower online growth rate (likely as it scales) and a higher print decline (which is already hovering around 10 percent per year), and you get a much worse time horizon before the newspaper industry can expect to recover.

So as not to end on a total down note ... perhaps those who move aggressively to improve their online content strategies and ad-serving technologies may yet avert calamity. Thus, our kudos this week go to the WashingtonPost.com, for launching 25 widgets in the past year and a half -- the latest one being a housing widget utilizing Google maps to enables users to search for apartments near Metro stations.

Very nice.