• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, February 29, 2008

Poor results in the fourth quarter of 2007 and January 2008 foreshadow another year of sliding revenues for newspapers. The news comes as no surprise to industry observers, following two straight years of declines in 2006-'07 in the face of Internet competition. Across the board, newspaper losses were driven by double-digit declines in classifieds, as well as accelerating declines in national and local advertising, including retail.

The Washington Post Company reported an 11% drop in print ad revenues in the fourth quarter of 2007 to $129.6 million, compared to the same period of 2006. The company's full-year ad revenues dropped 13% to $496.2 million. The company's Newsweek division saw ad revenues fall 13% to $288.4 million.

McClatchy said this week that revenues declined 14% in January 2008 to $176.8 million, compared to the same month in 2007. The decline was due mostly to a 16% drop in advertising revenue. Looking ahead, CFO Pat Talamantes said: "We were disappointed in our revenue performance in January, and foresee similar performance during the rest of the quarter."

Also this week, Gannett said January revenues fell 7.5% to $575.4 million compared to 2007, as newspaper advertising revenues fell 9.2% to $371.4 million. The company's broadcast division also suffered a 6% decline in revenues.

On Wednesday, Media General blamed an 8% drop in January revenues on a 14.9% decline in publishing revenue to $41.3 million, including a 17.3% drop in newspaper ad revenues, which slipped to $33.8 million. However, more detailed data was unavailable because the company said it will no longer publish results from specific newspaper categories --a hint that management expects things to get even worse at the newspaper division.

Online revenues continued growing at most of the companies, but the rate of growth appears to be slowing compared to previous periods. Furthermore, online is still just a small part of total revenues at all these companies; that means online revenue growth can't offset losses on the print side.

At the Washington Post company, online revenues grew 11% in 2007 to $114.2 million, down from a 28% growth rate in 2006. This also represented a slowdown in total dollars added--just $11.5 million in 2007 versus $22.5 million in 2006.

In January, McClatchy's monthly online revenues grew just 2.6% to $14.8 million, down from the 14.6% growth rate in January 2007. In dollar terms, that's an addition of just $400,000 this January versus $3.6 million last January.

Media General's local online revenues grew 11.8% in January, compared to 79% growth in the same month last year. However, the company didn't release specific dollar figures for the two periods. Likewise, Gannett didn't release online revenue figures, in dollar or percentage terms.