Before taking off for the Newspaper Show, Nexpo, in Orlando, April 22-25, The EAGLE decided to take a look at the overall health of the traditional daily newspaper industry.  For those of us who started our work in this industry during the time of the computerization of prepress functions, the early action was in newspapers.  Starting in the mid 1970's hot metal was routinely replaced by cold type, and in doing so, major cost reductions could be found in the overall computerization of the news room.  The late 70's were golden years for newspapers.  We can remember one production director who always padded his requests for prepress capital equipment figuring that he might get one out of three requests.  And, as it happened miraculously in 1981, he got them all; it was such a good year!

Besides the upcoming show, what made us think about this was a recent article that appeared in the International Herald Tribune, of all places, headlined, "Scary numbers for U.S. Newspapers."  According to Katherine Seclye, the reporter, U.S. newspaper circulation reached its peak in 1984.  At that time, there were over 1,600 morning and afternoon daily papers with a combined circulation of 63 million, excluding free papers.  Now in 2007, there are only 1,450 paid dailies, a loss of roughly 10%.  But from a circulation standpoint, which significantly affects ad revenue, it is now down to 53 million paid copies, a loss in circulation of almost 16%. 

Worse still, over the last two years, the losses have begun to accelerate.  We normally think of newspapers as the last bastion of offset print.  They were the ones making the massive shift to color and purchasing the largest CtP systems.  And, now we're hearing that this isn't such a great market to be in.  In fact, recent conversations with one of the top 3 consumables companies indicates that their thrust is now almost solely outside the U.S. and into China and India.