BREAKING NEWS: This just in, a newspaper actually made money!

The Washington Post Company's newspaper division reported on Wednesday that they earned revenue in the fourth quarter of 2009. In the fourth quarter of 2008, The Post reported an operation loss of $14.4 million, but an operating income of $3.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2009. The Post attributes the financial gain to continued cost cutting. I wish they had elaborated on how they cut costs so other papers could follow in their footstep and possibly start to turn a corner for the better. Although The Post had a loss of $163.5 million in 2009, the fourth quarter shows a glimmer of hope and I will be interested to see where their numbers are after the first quarter of 2010.

To give some perspective, at The Washington Post Co. their television stations went down 16% from 2008in revenue and their magazines went down 30% in revenue from 2008.

Read the full article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/24/AR2010022401924.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Social Media and Advertising

Poynter Online recently had an interesting article about advertising and social media. They discussed how some companies are now buying ads through a news agency to go out to all of their followers on Twitter. I can see some benefits of advertising in this way, but still think it is premature and won’t be successful in the long run.

My opinion could stem from not using Twitter myself, but I don’t think Twitter has developed enough to be a successful outlet for advertising. I do think it is marketable to small businesses that may not be able to afford a print ad, but the cost doesn’t seem high enough to really be making anything other than pocket change. I think in order to make any money from this type of advertisement there would need to be tweets every hour from different businesses, but this ultimately defeats the purpose of the Twitter feed. People are following the news agency to get immediate updates about local news and I believe followers will get annoyed quickly when the ad tweets start taking over the news tweets.

Small businesses are smart to use news agencies Twitter accounts to advertise though as opposed to their own Twitter because the news service will have a diverse group of followers that can bring new customers. For example, if a restaurant had their own Twitter account only those who already knew about the restaurant would follow them and learn about the special deals. Buying tweets from a news site gets your special deal out to a much more diverse audience that has the potential to bring in new customers.

To learn more about this concept read here: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=176228

Shannon Brownlee

Despite hearing Shannon Brownlee speak twice in two days, I was never bored and she kept me on the edge of my seat. She was challenging, refreshing, and encouraging all at the same time. Specifically in Economics of News, I thought she gave a ray of hope to a class that has been nothing but gloom and doom. We know the industries failing, we know the common proposed solutions, but to hear about how the industry has been through trials before and come out okay is a nice change. This is not just because the previous topics are often depressing, but because they can also be very repetitive.

In my Feature Writing class, the students challenged her with questions about the job market and the uncertainty of the industry. She was able to say confidently that students studying journalism now are in the best shape of anyway, especially those who have been out of school for a while. We are being educated in reporting, photography, multimedia, etc. And while we all have our specialties we will still be competent in many areas and marketable to an employer.