The newsonomics of near-term numerology

NiemanJournalismLab reporting:
Think about this. The Tampa Tribune, a paper that would have been worth hundreds of millions of dollars a decade ago, sold this week for $9 million.
Its seller, Media General completed the disposal of its newspaper properties, a movement that’s been celebrated by investors, with MEG moving up about 18 percent in the past month, quadrupling the S&P 500 performance for that period.
Why?
The easy answer would be that MEG is now a broadcast company. But wait — other newspaper-dominant stocks are way up, too. You can buy whole newspapers for the cost of mansions, and yet newspaper shares are going up.
Metro newspaper publishers tell you that next year will be still another down year for advertising, Yet some of those who peer into the future, estimating ad spend for the next several years, say they expect it to finally flatten out.
Numbers, numbers, numbers. Many are in motion, as the varying moves of Advance print reductions, Warren Buffett’s warm community print embrace, Doug Manchester’s blast-from-the-past San Diego moves, Aaron Kushner’s print-is-king Orange County Register foray, and adoptions of paywalls and marketing services as new revenue streams sweep across the country.
Let’s try to make a little sense of this cavalcade of numbers and see what they tell us about 2013, as we do a little news numerology.
Let’s look at revenues first. Look at the advertising forecasts of everyone from Borrell Associates to eMarketer and find a surprise: Basically, they’re flattening.
Follow the long squiggle downward of print advertising through 2012 — 18% decline in 2008, 28% decline in 2009, 8% decline in 2010 and 9% in 2011 — and then flat to more mildly downward. Why? Gordon Borrell, the long-time tracker of the digital disruption of the press, says the main reason is that things are looking up at smaller papers...
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