The Newspaper Association of America have released 2007 figures a week ago showing ad revenues fell by 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006. This is the biggest fall since 1950 when they started to track advertising in print. On the plus side for “word smiths” online ad revenue grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion in the same period - but online is still a small proportion of print & TV, at the moment but growing exponentially. You can bizarrely download the newspaper figures spreadsheet here.

This sudden drop forcibly reminded me of a great speaker Gary Carter (The CCO of Freemantle Media) who I blogged about back in 2006 when he keynoted a MipTV/Milia audience and pointed out that the only media form that had been invented and then died was the Telex - simply because Email was a direct replacement and fulfilled that human need of “longer form textual” one to one communication. I do wonder if there is indeed a direct predecessor for newspapers - with ubiquitous higher resolution mobile connected devices, larger more detailed TV screens (capable of displaying rich textual information) and of course the overdue but about to launch digital paper, is there a reason we still like newspapers and magazines is the tactile element only? I and many others (see Stephen Fry below) do not buy newspapers as they are dated as soon as you buy them among a host of other reasons…

A snippet from Stephen Fry explains the Internet

On a Web browser, these days, when you launch it you can have 10 sites as your homepage. All the sites that you want. So my homepages, my favourite sites, are news.bbc.co.uk, dull but obvious, because I don’t read newspapers, so for me this site on the Web is my source of news information, along with the radio. Google.co.uk/ig, which is now called iGoogle, where you put together your Google site. So I have everything to do with Macs and geeky things on one tab on my Google site. You can customize it, as I’m sure you’ve seen. Wikipedia, obviously, because I like to find out that I died, and that I’m currently in a ballet in China, and all the other very accurate and important things that the Wikipedia site brings us all. And IMDB Pro, which is an Internet movie database, which now belongs to Amazon of course, and the Pro one really is good for professionals and is really very useful. What are the more popular sites for me to use, I should pose like everyone else? YouTube, Videojug, increasingly of course, and just hopping along from site to site at random.