Tough times for all

By: Callie McBroom

Most of the news attention today is focused on tough economic problems for the country. Issues with personal finances that have a limited impact have now come alongside wide-spread concerns of failing financial institutions and insurance companies. Failure is not, however, limited to only financial institutions. We are also seeing some of these failures within the newspaper industry.

We all know that print newspapers have taken a substantial hit in recent years. Print revenues have been in a continuous downward spiral for years. This can be attributed to newspapers bringing in billions of dollars less every year in advertising revenues. Many newspapers are taking their news to online sources in hopes of finding revenue to balance out print sources. But even these revenues, according to Erick Schonfeld, were down 2.4 percent in the last year.

This could be turned around for newspapers soon because of a new platform just introduced by Yahoo. ATP brings the opportunity to publishers to sell into Yahoo local inventory and then brings several newspaper properties to national advertisers.

Newspapers are the first to have access to the new technology, which allows them to target advertisers and sell audience as opposed to section. Many are hoping that these new abilities will bring in revenue and save the future of newspapers.