AP
lowering fees again, by $45 million in 2010
The
Associated Press will be lowering its fees for U.S. newspapers next
year, Thomas Curley, AP’s chief executive, told AP June 16.
AP had previously lowered
its fees by $30 million this year and will reduce fees by a total
of $45 million for newspapers and broadcasters in 2010.
Curley told AP that the
organization expects its revenue to fall this year and next, but he
did not offer specifics. AP’s revenue rose 5 percent in 2008
to about $748 million.
The bulk of AP’s
revenue has traditionally come from selling its material to other
media. About 17 percent of AP’s revenue comes from the Internet
or other digital sources.
AP reported that it plans
to eliminate about 10 percent of its payroll costs by the end of this
year through attrition and early retirement offers. Management has
said that it hasn’t ruled out layoffs among its staff of 4,100
people.
Curley told AP that new
licensing contracts with its largest Internet customers are his top
priority. AP has online deals with Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft
Corp., and AOL.
AP reported that its deal
with Google has been uneasy, as AP and other newspapers have contended
that Google has made it too easy for Web sites pirating copyright
material to profit from advertisements shown alongside unlicensed
material.
AP also plans to review
more effective ways to capture revenue from advertising tied to its
stories, photography, audio and video, Curley said.
Curley also said readers
might be asked to pay to read and see some of the AP’s content
on mobile devices or computers.
AP is a 163-year-old nonprofit
cooperative owned by member newspapers.
Report:
U.S. newspapers to lose $13 billion by 2013
The newspaper industry
in North America is forecast to lose $13 billion in revenue by 2013,
according to a report by New York City-based PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
Editor & Published
reported that PriceWaterhouseCoopers’s Global Entertainment
and Media Outlook 2009-2013 report said the losses will stem mainly
from a drain in print advertising revenue.
Total newspaper advertising
will fall by a cumulative 32.7 percent during the next three years,
PriceWaterhouseCoopers said.
E&P reported that online
advertising revenue in North America is also expected to decline the
next two years, but PriceWaterhouseCoopers said online ad revenue
there will grow to $3.7 billion in 2013, which represents a 2.5 percent
increase when compounded annually from 2008.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers
estimated that the U.S. newspaper market will continue to suffer steep
declines through 2012.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers
said that in 2013, the U.S. market, which is weaker than Canada’s,
will have lost $25 billion from its peak in 2005.
Canada’s market has
been helped by a competitive newspaper climate, a slower rate of circulation
declines, and an increase in free newspapers, E&P reported.
Losses in classified advertising
during the five-year period will be substantial, PriceWaterhouseCoopers
reported. During the five-year period ending in 2013, recruitment
classified advertising will have lost 62.5 percent; real estate, 53.1
percent; and automotive, 49.2 percent.
Online advertising in the
United States might show growth in 2013.
“We expect
that an expanding economy will translate into growing online spending
and project a return to double-digit growth in 2013,” PriceWaterhouseCoopers
said in its report. By 2013, online advertising in the United States should reach $3.5
billion, which is a 2.3 percent increase on a compounded annual basis
from $3.1 billion in 2008.
GateHouse
Media coverage dropped by Morningstar
Morningstar,
a Chicago-based investment research company, announced June 22 that
it will no longer cover GateHouse Media, based in Fairport, N.Y.,
and owner of 117 weeklies in Eastern Massachusetts and nine shoppers
and 10 dailies in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Tom Corbett, who
has written reports for Morningstar on GateHouse in the past, wrote
on Morningstar’s Web site that GateHouse coverage was dropped
“to focus our resources elsewhere.”
Morningstar had indicated
in October that it would probably stop covering GateHouse because
GateHouse was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange when its share
price went under the exchange trading minimum of $1. Financial problems
caused GateHouse stock value to plummet during the past two years.
GateHouse now trades on
the so-called Pink Sheets, which provides quotes from broker-dealers
for some over-the-counter securities.
The items
above were written from published reports by Jen Slothower and Jennifer
Skala, graduate students at the Northeastern University School of
Journalism and news staff coordinators for the Bulletin.
