Some bleak reading for the printed side of the newspaper business, but some more encouraging points to takeaway for online news from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Future of News and the Internet report:
- In all OECD countries about 5 per cent of internet visits are related to news reading online;
- 2009 was the worst year for local and regional newspapers in OECD countries (listed at this link) – especially US, UK, Greece, Italy, Canada and Spain;
- The UK and US newspaper publishing markets suffered the biggest declines between 2007 and 2009.
But concludes the report:
[L]arge country-by-country and title-by-title differences and the data currently do not lend themselves to make the case for “the death of the newspaper”, in particular if non-OECD countries and potential positive effects of the economic recovery are taken into account.