The publisher said newspaper revenue dropped 20 percent in the third quarter, and print ads dropped by 28 percent; both of these numbers are worse than Q2, which saw revenue drop by 14 percent and print ads by 20 percent.

No relief from Web ads, either: Internet revenue dropped 18 percent, a decline from the nine percent drop in Q2. And online display ads, which had been more or less flat for the last few quarters, fell off a cliff, dropping 14 percent.

Don’t be duped by headlines reporting a drop in the newspaper division’s losses, by the way. That’s due to one-time accounting charges the previous year. If you look at operating revenue and expenses via a less formal, but more practical, lens, the results are very unpleasant: Losses increased by 55 percent (see summary below; click to enlarge).

Want more bad news? Okay: The company’s magazine group says revenue dropped 33 percent, driven by a staggering 48 percent drop in ad sales at Newsweek.

If you’re at, say, Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. and want to whistle past the graveyard, you can try blaming the drop on the title’s unsuccessful overhaul. But I find it hard to believe that Newsweek’s woes don’t reflect a larger magazine malaise. We’ll see next week.

The good news, as always: The big difference between the Post and many other publishers is that its parent company doesn’t depend on print media. The company’ core education business, which is what has sustained it for many years, continues to do well.

And just to be clear: The video is a joke. But the preroll ads that run before it–the two I’ve seen before are for Amway and some kind of fast food chain called Red Robin–are real. I think. Also not a joke: The New York Times (NYT)  is surveying readers to see what they’d think of paying $5 a month for Web access to the paper.

In related news, tomorrow is the first annual “Freelancers put on your pants day,” according to ASSME, which is a sort-of-serious blog/support group formed in the wake of last fall’s mass layoffs.

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.

So this report from the New York Times makes perfect sense:

Just five months after saying it would drop its frequency to every other week, U.S. News & World Report has decided instead to become a monthly magazine, employees said on Tuesday.

Less than a year ago, U.S. News still published weekly, but this year it began publishing less often, and in June, it announced that, come January, it would publish every two weeks. Executives conceded then that the magazine had ceased to be a newsweekly competing directly with Time and Newsweek.”

This may be dispiriting for U.S. News staffers who thought they were working for a news organization, but it makes plenty of sense as a business decision.

Lists, like the publication’s well-regarded education rankings, do well both in print and online, and are easy to sell to advertisers. And being the third player in a category where your competitors are getting crushed anyway is no place to be.

Bear in mind that Newsweek and Time have relatively deep-pocketed parent companies–the Washington Post Co. (WPO) and Time Warner (TWX), respectively–to help the titles as they try to survive. U.S. News relies on real estate biggie Mort Zuckerman, who has bigger worries these days.

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]