• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, June 19, 2007

Newspapers are in for another weak quarter, if the Gannett and Lee revenue reports for May are reliable indicators. In the continuing downdraft, Gannett saw advertising revenue at its newspapers fall 8%, compared to the same month last year. Lee's declined 2.3%.

Last week's New York Times Company's results mirrored their rivals' downward trajectory.

All three companies attributed the drop to continuing weakness in classified, national and retail ad categories. In print classifieds, Gannett was down 12.9%, Lee fell 5.8% and NYTCO was down 12.9%. National advertising revenue fell 5.4% at Gannett--including a 7.8% slump at USA Today--7.4% at Lee and 5.6% at NYTCO. Finally, retail revenue fell 5.7% at Gannett, 4% at Lee and 14.9% at NYTCO. Gannett also reported a 6.4% slump in local advertising, a major category for its chain of local newspapers.

One bright spot: Online advertising at all three companies is up, but Internet revenues are still not enough to offset print losses. In May, Lee's revenues rose 60.2%, and NYTCO was up 21.4%. Separate online revenue figures were not available for Gannett, but the company claimed 22.1 million unique visitors in May, representing a 14% share of the total online audience.

However, the discouraging May print results follow weak April numbers from all three companies, suggesting that the second quarter will see more year-over-year declines when the final tallies come in.

Gannett's total April ad revenues were down 4.9% from the same period last year, Lee reported a 3.4% drop and NYTCO's total ad revenues fell 3.6%. Indeed, Lee also released its quarterly results, which came in below Wall Street expectations, in part because of continuing weakness in June revenues.