As your audience goes...

If there's any doubt why some traditional news outlets are concentrating on building up their Web presence, this should help clear it all away. It also explains this.

As much unintentional joy as the Detroit News gives me, it also happens to be the best media Web site in Michigan, because it has lots and lots of content. Eventually, this could translate into the News overtaking the Free Press as the state's premier media outlet, because the Free Press' Web site by comparison is anemic and watered down. That people are willing to sign up and write for the News' Web site for nothing more than exposure says something.

It used to be, back in my dark college days, that professors would tell us that newspapers will always be around, if for no other reason that people would want to read box scores while on the can. There's something to that, but it's not a very robust medium. The smart minds are already staking out ground online.

There are two interested developments in this report. The first is that a dwindling of audience is expected to continue. The reasons for this are many, not the least of which is that the demographics of newspaper readership today reflect an aging audience. The kids these days, they like their information free and online, where they can peruse the news while checking MySpace or Facebook. Newspapers have expended considerable energy over the last few years to attract these folks, but it's obviously not working well. In fact, it's probable that some of their readership losses come from traditional demographics, who have been a little later coming to the Internet table, but finding the wealth of free stuff on topics that interest them specifically (and not that some editor somewhere thinks interests them) attractive.

The second is this:

Mr. Coen attributed the decline largely to “the beleaguered local sector” of ad spending, “which hasn’t done very well in traditional media,” he said, because local advertisers “continue to cut to the bone.”

Also, “consolidations are killing things” locally, Mr. Coen said, referring to combinations of local department stores, pharmacies and hardware chains, which are reducing the ranks of potential advertisers.

That was demonstrated — painfully, if you own a local newspaper — in Mr. Conaghan’s presentation. In the third quarter, when Federated Department Stores replaced a host of local retail names with the Macy’s brand, he said, the company’s ad spending in newspapers fell about 14 percent from the same period a year ago.

If there is one place that newspapers are doing well with circulation, it's in local communities. The information for these places has been slow to make it to the Web, usually only provided by the local paper. Yet, when the advertisers aren't there to support the news operation, it translates into staffing cuts, which ultimately translates into a newspaper with less exclusive content.

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