Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

The Washington Post’s Sales Slump Gets Less Bad, Too

This makes sense: Just like the New York Times (NYT), the Washington Post Company (WPO) says things have gotten less bad at its flagship newspaper.

The Post’s print ads, in fact, are recovering more quickly than the Times. But its online turnabout has been more modest.

The numbers you care about: Newspaper revenue declined four percent in Q4, and print ad revenue dropped nine percent. Much better than the drops of 20 percent and 28 percent, respectively, that the Post recorded in Q3.

Online revenue, meanwhile, edged up by one percent, and online display ads bumped up 13 percent. A big turnaround from the 18 percent and 14 percent drops last fall.

As always: Remember what the economy was like a year ago when you think about these year-over-year comparisons.


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As long as the newspaper was a bundle, no one ever had to care that people were buying it for radically different reasons. But once you go online, and people can unbundle things, where you can traffic directly to a story without going through the home page or any of the rest of it, suddenly what it — the individual choices made by individual readers come to matter a lot.

— – Clay Shirky, on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan