Newspapers are already struggling to win advertising in the face of digital competition and what once seemed like an unstoppable revolution... is now shaking on the tracks.
Metro International, as our story reports, is making some high-profile redundancies at its flagship US papers, Metro New York and Metro Boston, and could possibly sell them on to joint venture partner the New York Times Co.The sale follows a strategic review of its short and long-term agenda in October after disappointing third-quarter results, with a loss of $18.2m (£8.9m), more than double that of last year, as margins fell across Europe and the US.None of this is to say that the freesheet market's days are numbered, but it is certainly facing challenging conditions that will only gets worse as the advertising market starts to feel the pinch of recession. That won't even happen this year according to WPP Group chief executive, Sir Martin Sorrell, who said earlier this week that it is 2009 we have to worry about after the quadrennial bonus (Olympics, US Presidential elections, European Football Championships) are firmly in our review mirror. The bumps in the road for the freesheet market international have not yet hit the UK, where there is still much talk of expansion even as News International's thelondonpaper and Associated Newspaper's London Lite battle it out.There is talk of a national newspaper entering the fray. Or at least there has been for the last few weeks. My prediction is that this will not happen. Not this year and not next. That is not to say that in the more niche freesheet magazine market where Mike Soutar's Shortlist and Sport have cut a swathe there is not room for more players.And so to the Murdoch and The Wall Street Journal. There was much excitable media talk when he was buying Dow Jones with the media mogul giving every indication that the subscription days of WSJ.com were over. The Financial Times panicked and dropped access (if to a very limited degree).It did seem that the last bastion of content subscription charges would be banished. The last vestige of the early days of the web, of content is king, but as Murdoch's finger hovered it seems that he had a change of heart.Maybe it was the numbers that came out after he had made his initial comments about dumping subscription charges that revealed that the WSJ.com has just signed its one millionth subscriber. I'm sure it was partly that and I'm sure also it was partly the storm clouds gathering over the global economy and over the advertising forecasts.In such stormy conditions, it suddenly makes no sense to dump a 1m strong source of revenue when opening your site up might not bring in as strong as expected advertising revenues.Just two weeks ago, the latest Bellwether Report said that growth in internet adspend appears to be falling off, with the smallest upward revision to online marketing budgets since the autumn of 2003.
Gordon Macmillan
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