March 17 — It is changing. This morning one of our regional weekly business journals reported that the Journal Register Company (NYSE: JRC), publisher of our only daily paper as well as 26 other dailies and 327 other non dailies is facing tough times. Earlier this month they hired Lazard Freres to help devise a financial strategy and received a delisting notice from the New York Stock Exchange. Then I see a feature in The Drudge Report about an earnings loss by The New York Times for the quarter –”one of the worst periods the company and the newspaper industry have seen,” the paper said. Browsing through blogs in the evening, I realized that I was as much in blogs as in mainstream media (MSM). One of them, On Line Spin’s David Morgan predicts a tough four years ahead for the newspaper business.

He wanders into a future where the hometown paper is gone, where weeklies emerge to fill the gap for local business advertising and to some degree the thirst for news. he anticipates a death spiral of offline media which must support huge overhead. And he sees their demise as an opportunity for backfilling.

Someone will have to create a vehicle for the free-standing inserts and what will local businesses do but look for media replacements to carry the in-your-face promotions.

My point is not to repeat what is being covered so well. My point is that those who need to market should be moving into the new media. The groundswell is underway as attested to by the dismal financial news.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 12:16 am by admin and is filed under Advertising, Mainstream media, Marketing Communications, New Communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.