Oregon Media Insiders

Such as the Tribune? WW? The Mercury? Business Journal? The Sellwood Bee? Anyone know?

From what I’ve read, traditional media is losing ground to the internet. Newspapers are losing circulations; cities with multiple dailies are drying up. The same goes for the numbers of people watching television news broadcasts, for those numbers continue to decline.

I get most of my news from new media and frankly love it. I can pick and choose the source of my news and related material at a click of a mouse. Plus I can interact with this new medium by posting my own insights when the option applies.

Most of what I read in the paper has to do with local happenings, the Metro section in the Oregonian, the front page story of the Portland Tribune and the Clark County section of the Columbian. From local sports to general criminal mayhem and everything in between, I like to read about my community the old fashioned way, via the local newspaper.

I would expect as marketers become even savvier about where to place advertising, newspapers will continue to lose ad revenue to other mediums. But I must say that I pay more attention to advertising in newspapers than on the internet. In fact, I find internet advertising rather annoying. Mostly because it is both distracting and isn’t geared to local businesses.

In the end, newspapers for me are about local news.

This means fewer trees were cut down. That's good at least.

I do know that a little while back the Gresham Outlook had printed it was bucking the trend and actually was seeing its circulation go up - which meant they were increasing the size of the paper.

Don't take into account the number of hits a newspaper's web site gets.

For all that's wrong with it -- a long list -- OregonLive gets literally millions of unique user hits a month. And it generates ad revenue.

So, yeah, print isn't moving as much. But the newspaper brands are still viable. They're just being delivered differently. It may be, in fact, that a paper like the O has more actual readers/users now that it's on the web than not: Blazer fans who've moved away, expat Oregonians, etc. I know I read my hometown paper online after going without it for decades.

I don't have the stats and they likely are losing readers as well, but remember losing circulation is not always synonymous to losing readers. Or at least the numbers may not be as large...yet.

My wife still likes Jumble in the Comics section. We'll continue to subscribe unless this is dropped.

A recent Government Accountability Office report on local broadcasters and quality of news (http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-08-383) reported that few news web sites "were unaffiliated with the traditional media outlets." So internet news sources are still generally the same sources as what gets printed in the Olympian.

As TALPDX said,

But newspapers are still making an enormous amount of money; they've just had to reduce their profit margins from 19% to 15%.

At least the Food Day circulation numbers are staying steady! ;-)

In March, Oregonlive did not make the list of the top 30 newspaper sites, in terms of unique hits, as measured by Nielsen Online. According to Editor & Publisher, this means the site had fewer than 1.432 million hits in March (San Diego Union-Tribune at No. 30). The New York Times topped the list with 18.869 million unique hits.