Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Newspaper print ad sales have declined more than $20 billion in six years. In that time, digital ads growth has erased only 2% of the losses.

Emma Gardner of the Economist Group presents a visual look back at digital publishing in 2012. No visual struck me more than the graph below showing the extent of devastation to newspaper print ad sales since 2006: $20 billion in annual revenue, down the drain. In that time, digital ad growth has erased only 2% of the losses. How dreadful.

Where did the digital money go? It went to new online marketplaces, and apps, and sites. And Google. Yeah, basically the money went to Google. In 2006, Google made $60 billion less than U.S. newspapers and magazines. Now it makes more ad money than all of U.S. print media combined. Wow....

If the newspaper is to survive, does it become miniscule? That’s the prediction from a Dutch designer and printer, who unveiled two new takes on really tiny newspapers at the World Printing Summit on Tuesday.

One prototype is a single broadsheet page, folded and refolded until it is A5 size. You open it, piece by piece, like an unfolding paper flower, to read all the content. The other version is two broadsheet pages, folded down to A4 size.

Designer Koos Staal thinks these are logical designs – newspapers have been reducing size since the tabloid revolution began in 2003. But a tabloid really isn’t that small. “If you wanted to read it all, it would take three hours,” he says....