• Bloomberg, Monday, July 16, 2007 10:35 AM

The newspaper industry's ad woes are apparently getting worse, with one top broadsheet seeing advertising plummet 27% in the second quarter. The Los Angeles Times had "one of the worst quarters we have ever experienced," publisher David Hiller told his employees. Total sales fell 10% as slump in ad pages more than offset gains from online operations and newspaper supplements.

The Times is owned by Tribune Co., which is being bought for $8.2 billion by a group led by Sam Zell. "Results were similar across Tribune, but overall, Tribune was worse than the industry," Hiller says. The declines could complicate completion of the sales, notes analyst Ed Atorino of Benchmark Co. "It's going to cast a pall over the deal," Atorino says. "The stock is going to go down."

But Hiller disagrees, pointing out that "the current trends across the whole industry are in the negative range. We're hoping to do a variety of things to improve upon them."

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