Newspaper stocks lost $64.5 billion (83%) in 2008

[Newsjock]

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2008/12/newspaper-share-value-fell-64b-in-08.html

In the worst year in history for publishers, newspaper shares dropped an average of 83.3% in 2008, wiping out $64.5 billion in market value in just 12 months.

Although things were tough for all sorts of businesses in the face of the worst economic slump since the 1930s, the decline among the newspaper shares last year was more than twice as deep as the 38.5% drop suffered by the Standard and Poor’s average of 500 stocks.

... It is fair to surmise that newspaper stocks last year got trounced twice as badly as the broader market , because investors have not seen any plausible strategies from publishers to reverse the accelerating declines in readership, advertising and profitability that have been under way since 2006.

As if that were not bad enough, a number of publishers are staggering under the heavy debt they acquired in recent years to fund acquisitions that might have proven to be wise, if the newspaper industry had been able to replicate the steady growth in sales and profits that they largely had enjoyed in the decades since World War II.

[EconomicLiberal]

1. How about the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal?

I imagine readers and advertisers are getting tired of the right-wing garbage that those two newspapers exclusively feature.

[Idealism]

2. Rupert-owned

He isn't running out of money anytime soon, and its one of the ways he can have a say in the minds of Americans, so he will keep it running until it kills him

[snot]

3. The media-acquirers Katrina-tized media:

The media that stopped reporting real news lost business.

The media that continued to report real news have gained it.

[truedelphi]

4. The M$M's tactic of dumbing us down by playing up "issues" like

Britney Spears and her husband or Paris Hilton etc - all that backfired.

People figured that if the newspapers weren't telling real news, then it was easier to just lay back and Watch Colbert and Jon Stewart. And unfortuantely for the Powers that Be those two really report on things. Bush makes a statement, and Jon Stewart takes the viewer back into history when Bush said he'd never say that.

[fasttense]

5. They are simply not printing anything anyone wants to read.

The years Woodward and Bernstein were writing for the Washington Post, you couldn't find a copy of the paper after 10 am.

If the papers had been writing the truth, then so many people would not have turned to the internets to find the truth. Instead most of the major papers published the bush gang's propaganda and talking points and newspapers in general got a bad name. Now, most people don't trust the veracity of their reporting. Why pay for something just to get lies?

[Kahuna]

6. Right. And now they are going to make up for the "easy ride" they gave

bushco, by breathlessly reporting about, what Obama knew about Blago, even after Fitz said he had no involvment. :crazy: Then, after Obama issued his report, they had the nerve to blame Obama for the controversy because if he had 'come clean in the first place they would have never made it a media frenzy...' :banghead: