Newspapers Still Falling, Just Not as Freely

A reminder that the ad recession isn’t over by any stretch, at least for some industries: The newspaper business saw ads drop 5.6 percent in Q2, an industry group says. Google’s (GOOG) Q2, by the way: Up 24 percent.

If you’re feeling half-empty, you’ll note that this is in comparison with the spring of 2009, when the economy was still in shocked-and-awed mode. So the fact that newspaper revenue is continuing to decline is pretty grim, indeed.

Want to be more positive about this? No problem: You can note, as the WSJ does, that the industry’s rate of decline has decreased steadily over the last year: In Q2 of last year, it was an atrocious 29 percent. But things have been getting less bad since then, and the shrinkage had dropped to single digits by the beginning of 2010. Meanwhile some papers are doing even less bad: The New York Times (NYT) reported flat ad revenue last quarter, which qualifies as pretty good news indeed by today’s standards.