The NYT Sees a Slowing Print Decline, but Don't Call It a Bellwether
As it did last year, The New York Times Co. (NYT) yesterday released an update to its expectations for the fourth quarter in advance of its presentation at the annual UBS Global Media and Communications Conference. This year, the headline was -- relatively speaking -- good news, in that the company felt comfortable saying print advertising was "only" going to decline by four percent, rather than the 5.8 percent the company had projected earlier.
But, while most of the coverage about the NYT Co.'s more upbeat forecast saw this as good news for the newspaper industry, it's hard to call the NYT Co. all that much of a bellwether. When compared to its big-circ rivals -- News Corp.'s (NWS) The Wall Street Journal and Gannett (GCI), which publishes USA Today -- it's pretty clear that the intricacies of the markets they serve and differences in how they crunch the numbers makes it hard to compare them on an apples-to-apples basis.
Right now, the NYT's rivals look better. Here's how the WSJ and Gannett's publishing unit (which also includes its regional papers) did in the last quarter, while the NYT Co. was posting a 5.8 percent decline in print ad revenues:
- Print advertising for the Wall Street Journal was up by five percent in the third quarter (owner News Corp.'s fiscal Q1), while revenue at WSJ Digital was up 17 percent.
- Gannett's reporting is a bit murky -- it gets hard to tell when digital revenue gets put in the mix -- but its advertising revenue numbers, while not nearly as good as the Journal's show more promise than NYT Co. did as well. National advertising was up 1.9 percent, mainly on the strength of the automotive category, and ad pages at USA Today were up from 495 to 493 for the quarter. On a "constant currency" basis, however, ad revenue was down by 3.8 percent.
On the other hand, it doesn't have the focus or the big corporate backing of The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, Gannett, instead of relying for print advertising on two big markets -- New York and Boston -- relies on one huge national one and many smaller ones to bolster its business. Which is to say that relatively good news for the Times is relatively good news for the NYT Co., but if you're printing some other newspaper, your results may well vary.
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