NEWS
Community Newspapers Announce 3rd Quarter Financial Results
Encouraging trends further differentiate the community segment from the metro
dailies
News Release
For more information, contact Nancy Lane, President, Suburban Newspapers of America
at (843) 390-1531 or nancy.lane@suburban-news.org.
1/21/2009 — Community newspapers continue to experience only a slight downturn
in advertising revenues, contrary to industry-wide reported trends, according to
third quarter 2008 financial data collected by the trade associations — Suburban
Newspapers of America (SNA) and the National Newspaper Association (NNA). The SNA/NNA
financial reporting group reports total ad revenue at $394 million, a 1.7% decline
from the same quarter in 2007. As a point of comparison, NAA has reported an overall
decline of 18% for the industry in the third quarter.
Hundreds of daily and weekly community newspapers, representing over 10.5 million
in circulation with annual revenues of nearly $2 billion, participated in the SNA/NNA
financial reporting group for the third quarter. Reports conducted in the first
half of 2008 by SNA showed a 2.7% decline for the first quarter of 2008 against
the same quarter of 2007 and a decline of 2.4% for the second quarter. Again, significantly
better than the overall industry declines reported by NAA of 12.85% and 15.11% respectively.
“Local advertisers continue to value the hyper-local news and desirable local audience
provided by community newspapers,” said SNA President Nancy Lane, “Community papers
are affected by the current economic downturn but they are not in a crisis; in fact,
there are some that are showing growth.”
As three quarters of results from the SNA financial reports would indicate, community
newspapers are not experiencing the massive ad revenue declines that are being felt
by some others in the industry. And they are not reducing staff in significant ways.
In fact, 83% of the reporting companies had no planned staff reductions in 2008.
Once again, the variance explanations are economy-driven. Community newspapers are
experiencing slight declines in advertising revenue mainly due to classified categories
that have been hard hit by the slumping economy. In many cases, they have made up
much of those losses on the retail and preprint side. Large retailers, for example,
have added many community papers to their buy in the last few years to increase
their preprint penetration in key markets.
Suburban Newspapers of America is a trade association representing nearly 2,400
daily and weekly newspapers in the United States and Canada. SNA has experienced
eight years of record growth — another indication of the strength of this
segment of the industry. LocalPoint Media, a new national network managed by SNA’s
for-profit subsidiary, placed $400,000 in 2008, representing all new national business
for the community newspaper industry. For more information,
www.suburban-news.org, www.snalocalpapers.com
and www.localpointmedia.com.
Established in 1885, the National Newspaper Association is the voice of America¹s
community newspapers and the oldest national newspaper association in the country.
NNA represents an industry that serves, informs, educates and entertains more than
60 million readers every week from Main Streets across the nation For more information,
www.nna.org.
Note about the third quarter report: financial data was tracked for all products
published except dailies over 100,000 (although most SNA and NNA members do not
publish papers in this size range). Due to the wide variety of reporting procedures,
only total advertising was tracked. Category variances were explained in open-ended
fields. The accounting firm of Dennis, Gartland & Niergarth handled the collection
of data and the verification process.