What will New Jersey do after newspapers?

by: Hopeful

Thu Sep 09, 2010 at 03:49:19 PM EDT

At a recent conference, The New York Times' publisher and chairman Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., stated that he eventually expects the "Gray Lady" will no longer be a physical newspaper.

"We will stop printing the New York Times sometime in the future, date TBD," he said to attendees of the International Newsroom Summit.

I believe New Jersey is especially dependent on newspapers because TV and radio are dominated by our neighboring cities of New York and Philadelphia. Now, electronic vs. paper doesn't really matter to me as a reader, but it sure matters to the newspaper industry. The Newsosaur blog tells us the situation continues to be disastrous:

Newspaper advertising revenues are on track this year to dive to a 25-year low of approximately $26.5 billion, or 47% of the record $49.4 billon in sales achieved by the industry as recently as 2005...

The only bright spot for publishers in the last five years is that online advertising has climbed 54.3% to $1.5 billion in the first half of 2010 from $955 million in 2005.

Unfortunately, this category represented only 11.8% of total newspaper revenues in the first half of 2010 and its growth has done nothing to offset the prodigious declines in all the other advertising verticals.

I'm not really a reporter and I'm certainly no businessman but obviously $1.5 billion in online revenue is nothing like a replacement for $48 billion in print ads.  

Is the future joint TV-newspaper enterprises? The problem is that the experiments so far haven't worked, and it doesn't do us any good in New Jersey anyway since the NY/Philly stations don't care about us. Meanwhile, Newsosaur also points us to how internet groups doom publisher paywalls even for local news.