‘Wounded Beast’ Would Be Hobbled by Market Downturn

A market downturn would be a serious blow to an already beleaguered press and broadcast industry, experts say, depressing already hard-hit advertising revenues and possibly leading to hiring freezes and layoffs.“A general economic recession would be a further wound to an already wounded beast,” a reporter for the American Journalism Review and the Washington Post, Paul Farhi, said.Advertising pages for magazines dropped 0.5%, to 114,659, in the first half of the year compared with the same period last year, according to Publishers Information Bureau. Earlier this summer, the advertising research firm TNS Media Intelligence revised downward its prediction for advertising spending for the press and broadcast industry, to an increase of 1.7%, or $152.3 billion, from a forecast of 2.6% growth in January.The country’s three largest newsweeklies, Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report, typify the situation. These publications “were beset in 2006 by stagnant ad pages, the continuing rise of new print competitors, and trouble maintaining the circulation numbers promised to advertisers,” the State of the News Media 2007, an annual report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, reported recently.Since the market turmoil began in mid-July, the Dow has fallen just 4%, while several press companies have seen much larger losses. Time Warner Inc., parent company of Time, is down 8%, while shares of CBS, Viacom, and News Corp. are off 9%. Many of these companies have significant amounts of debt, making them even more vulnerable to the current liquidity crunch. News Corp. has about $12.5 billion in debt on its balance sheets, for example, while Time Warner has nearly $36 billion in debt.Beyond advertising, these companies could also suffer from a recently announced dip in consumer spending, an associate economist with Moody’s Economy.com, Andrew Gledhill, said. “People have less money to spend on discretionary things and then those things are among the first things people cut,” he said. “They won’t cut cable altogether, but they won’t upgrade to the more expensive package.”While many say the chances of a recession still seem slim, Moody’s Investors Service has raised its odds of a recession to one in four—the highest level in four years.“There is a lot uncertainty as to where this is going to go. … In this kind of period you are going to see more hiring freezes, rather than layoffs,” Mr. Gledhill said.In the past, recessions have led to layoffs in the magazine and publishing worlds, largely because advertising revenues have slumped, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Between 1993 and 1995, New York City’s press companies laid off 2,300 employees, the Federal Reserve Bank found. They increased the number of temporary and part-time workers as a cost cutting move, as would likely happen now in the case of a recession, analysts said. In 2001, a weak economy was linked to an advertising slump that forced companies such as News Corp. to implement hiring freezes.New York’s press companies are some of the nation’s largest and richest, so they have more to cut, and will face the pressure to cut before everyone else, according to Mr. Farhi.“My guess is, they are big enough to withstand the worst of it, but a recession will whack them hardest and leave them less able to do what they do now,” he said.The online universe is one place where advertising and revenue are currently showing good growth. TNS Media Intelligence predicts a 16% growth in Internet advertising in 2007. That increase has not been able to offset losses in more traditional sectors of the industry, partly because the online outlets are still evolving and make up a smaller portion of the industry.“The Internet is going to grow in leaps and bounds, but the majority — the vast majority — of our money still comes from the network,” CBS Corp.’s president and CEO, Leslie Moonves, said in a conference call with analysts July 31. “I am still very bullish about the power of network television being the primary focus for our content and our advertising.”YouTube is one of the stars of the popular new media platforms, and Google paid $1.65 billion to purchase it late last year. Still, no one had figured out how to advertise on the streaming video without alienating the audience until the company last week announced that interactive advertisements would soon be rolling at the bottom of YouTube videos.Only time will tell how viewers will respond, but in traditional sectors such as the news business, the real question now is how fast online businesses will grow, and whether they will provide the same kind of economic support for news gathering that the traditional outlets did, Mr. Farhi said. So far, no balance has been struck.

‘Wounded Beast’ Would Be Hobbled by Market Downturn

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