It can’t say that anymore.

The Post says revenue at its flagship paper was down 22 percent in the last quarter and that print ad revenue was down 33 percent. That’s worse than the declines of 13 percent and 21 percent it posted in the previous quarter. And it’s lousier than the poor results the Times posted last month, when it reported that overall ad revenue had dropped 27 percent.

The same holds for the Post’s online business: Even in the good old days, it wasn’t growing fast enough to counter the decline at the print business. But now, online is declining, too.

Web revenue was down eight percent, because the classifieds business has been decimated. Online display ads, at least, were up a meager three percent. But last quarter, display ads were up 10 percent and the overall business was still growing five percent.

As usual, the real difference between the Post and the Times isn’t their performance but their corporate structure: The Times is pure-play media business that’s now choking on debt, while the Post is an education company (Kaplan) that happens to own a newspaper, which makes all of these grim results much easier to bear.

Here’s a survey of the rest of the Post’s business lines. Click on the image to enlarge.

Take the Washington Post Company’s (WPO) Q3 report card, for instance. It’s bad. But it’s better than the last one the troubled newspaper and education company earned.

And yes, you have to be in the media business to look at a seven percent yearly decline in revenue, which is what Wapo’s newspaper group recorded, as a positive. But that decrease is better than Q2, when newspaper revenues were down 13 percent.

And there are more lemonade-from-lemon stats available:

• Online ads are up 13 percent year-over-year, an acceleration from the four percent growth they recorded in Q2. And given that most publishers saw decreasing growth this summer, that’s a decent achievement. Display ads were up 32 percent. (Flipside: Lucrative online classified ads were down eight percent).
• Print ads declined 14 percent y/y, but that’s better than the 22 percent decrease last quarter.
• Revenues at WPO’s magazine group were down four percent, but that’s better than Q2′s 15 percent decrease. And ads at Newsweek were down 13 percent, but last quarter they declined 21 percent.

Meanwhile WPO’s Kaplan education unit, which now accounts for more than half of the company’s revenue, did just fine. And its cable group did well, too.

There. Doesn’t that feel better?

Alas, MediaMemo does have to point out that the company’s local TV group did poorly, just like most local TV groups have been doing.

The unit’s revenues were basically flat at $78 million. But if you strip out one-time boosts from political and Olympic-related ads, it’s down some 8.5 percent, which is worse than last quarter’s six percent decline. Happy Halloween!

[Image Credit: cliff1066]