The newsonomics of zero and The New York Times

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
Perhaps zero is the loneliest number.
That’s the number The New York Times Co. — the United States’ second largest newspaper company — ended up with 2012, as it reported revenues last week. The most accurate number, when the year’s anomalous 53rd accounting week is taken out, is 0.3 percent up. Still, that’s a variety of zero, especially when we look at NYT Co.’ last quarter, where it ended down 0.7 percent.
Zero would seem to indicate not much happening here. Zero is an unsexy digit for corporate revenues — flat, as in pancake. It’s not growth, and it’s not death-spiral decline — both phenomena much easier to describe. So zero is causing lots of problems for those — financial analysts, investors, and media beat reporters — trying to describe the state of legacy print media today. But, in fact, the Times’ zero is noteworthy, and tells us much about the strategies — and straits — of our publishing times.
The New York Times Co.’s zero, in fact, is actually a milestone number. It’s the first increase, however meager, in overall revenues since 2006, when it managed a 1.8 percent increase in revenues.
Check out the chart below and you can see, year by year, the sharp decline in NYT Co. revenues. Back in 2007, advertising and circulation revenues totalled almost $3 billion. The decline since then has happened almost entirely in advertising.
If you take out the $276 million earned in 2007 by the company’s Regional Newspaper Group (sold off in 2012), the Times’ remaining flagship and New England properties would have produced about $1.7 billion in advertising back then. That means ad revenues are 52 percent of what they were seven years ago
http://www.niemanlab.org/2013/02/the-newsonomics-of-zero-and-the-new-york-times/?utm_source=Daily+Lab+email+list&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=1a8c2459e8-DAILY_EMAIL