• TechCrunch, Friday, September 5, 2008 11 AM

We knew things were bad for the newspaper industry, but we didn't know they were this bad. The Newspaper Association of America on Thursday said that not only did print revenues fall precipitously in the second quarter, but online revenues also fell 2.4% to $777 million.

Really? Online revenues? There may be a recession going on outside, but online ad revenues haven't actually been falling anywhere, not even at AOL. As TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld notes, the common practice of bundling print and online ad sales probably has something to do with the declines, as advertisers trained to buy the entire bundle are probably abandoning the whole package due to budget cuts. "The advertising recession is in full swing, and no segment is safe any longer," he says.

Meanwhile, the print side is in a "death dive." Total print spending in the U.S. fell 16% in the second quarter to $8.8 billion. As Alan Mutter says in a post at Reflections of a Newsosaur, this marks nine consecutive quarters of print revenues declining "at an almost continuously accelerating rate."

Read the whole story at TechCrunch »