Five tough questions for newspaper organizations as they face investors this week

poynter reporting:
It is time again for the annual December media conference for investors in New York City, starting today. And once again, borrowing the well-worn line from “I Love Lucy,” executive teams from publicly-traded newspaper organizations “have a lot of ‘splaining to do.”
No doubt about it,  2011 has been another terrible year financially for the industry – though the “why” matters. Will news organizations blame it all on a soft economy? Or will they talk candidly about competition for digital marketing dollars, the one part of the advertising pie still expanding, with an array of potent competing players?
I see four other related questions that make sense to ask right now.
What about 2012? Analyst and consultant Ken Doctor wrote a few weeks ago that newspapers are budgeting for continued ad revenue declines of 10 percent or so (on top of those in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011). If that’s the case, where will they find more savings or significant new revenue? Can they be profitable?
How much would a recovering economy help? Just in the last few weeks, there has been mildly encouraging economic news on jobs and real estate. Autos continue to do well. A revival in these three traditional key categories would be particularly helpful to the hardest hit newspaper organizations in Florida, California and other slumping Sunbelt cities. It would also be a test of which companies have done best following the old classified business into digital formats. And it might shed light on how much of the steep advertising declines of the last five years tracks the economic cycle and how much is loss of share.
So where do the companies stand in transformation to multi-platform and, eventually, mostly digital companies? The “we-get-it” story about the need to grow digital and escape over-reliance on print advertising has been around for quite a while now. Check the Gannett home page and you will find no mention of newspapers — though print still accounts for roughly 40 percent of the company’s revenue (my estimate, Gannett financials are inexact on the point).
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/business-news/the-biz-blog/154818/five-tough-questions-for-newspaper-organizations-as-they-face-investors-this-week/