Womack Publishing Co. Inc., which founded the weekly newspaper 17 years ago, cites the recession and declining advertising revenue.

Subscribers will receive prorated refunds, as will advertisers with multi-week contracts.

Virginia-based Womack Publishing owns and operates 15 community newspapers in North Carolina and Virginia.

Source: Charlotte Business Journal

The newspaper also plans to cut the hours of some workers. If economic conditions don’t improve, the McClatchy (nyse: MNI – news – people )-owned paper said Monday that a one-week furlough will be imposed later this year.

The Observer announced the cuts on its Web site. It said the 14.6 percent reduction means a loss of 60 full-time and 22 part-time employees in several departments, including advertising, operations, circulation, marketing and the newsroom.

Source: Forbes.com

And, while it’s been very clear that unless the papers made radical changes to their business model they would go bankrupt – we didn’t expect it to happen THIS YEAR!

In fact – 2009 may be the final year of major newspaper circulation as we’ve always known it. Watch this video report posted by NBC today and you decide.

Newspaper circulation continues to deteriorate as people increasingly go online for news that is timelier and free. And the relatively high fixed costs of paper, printing and distribution show no signs of waning.

And there is little relief online, where newspaper revenues are dropping as well.  eMarketer estimates that even Internet revenues dipped slightly in 2008, 0.4% to $3.15 billion.

In my humble opinion – the newspaper may not be around in another few years.  And why would it?  Look at what the internet did to the travel agent industry.  They’ve for the most part..gone the way of the dodo bird.  Same thing will happen to the newspaper as they no longer provide a relavent service at current price points.

It would be easy to accuse editors and publishers of being clueless about the coming Internet disruption and to insist that the industry’s proper reward for decades of haughty attitude, bad planning, and incompetence is bankruptcy.

But newspapers have really, really tried to wrap their hands around the future and preserve their franchise, an insight I owe to Pablo J. Boczkowski’s 2004 book, Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. The industry has understood from the advent of AM radio in the 1920s that technology would eventually be its undoing and has always behaved accordingly.

For instance, publishers aggressively pursued radio licenses in the early days of broadcasting and, later, sought and acquired TV licenses when they were dispensed. As early as 1947, Walter Annenberg’s Philadelphia Inquirer and John S. Knight’s Miami Herald experimented with fax editions of their papers. Seems visionary enough to me.

Read full article from Slate.com

JULY 22, 2008

What’s black, white and has red ink all over?

It has been a rough time for the newspaper industry in the US, with a series of layoffs against a backdrop of falling revenues. Consumers still read newspapers, but the rise of online news and opinion sites and blogs has given them additional reading choices. 

One fresh indicator that print newspaper readers are shifting to news sites comes from the Readership Institute. Although two-thirds of Internet users surveyed in July 2008 said they still used print newspapers about as much as they did before they started visiting news sites, more than one-quarter said they were reading print less as a result, and that figure has grown during the past 5 years.

Read full article here.

Total advertising expenditures at newspaper companies were $10.9 billion for the third quarter of 2007, a 7.4 percent decrease from the same period a year earlier.
Spending for print ads… continue read