Monday, January 29, 2007

Publications Taking Blows On and Offline

BullDog Reporter on Friday noted a study by Challenger, Gray & Christmas that saw an 88 % surge in media job cuts this year. In 2005, 9,453 jobs were cut and in 2006, more than 17,809 eliminations were announced. The study also revealed that more than 2,000 jobs cuts were already announced during the first 15 days of 2007 and predicts many more jobs to be eliminated this year. This is almost as scary as the murder rate in Richmond and Oakland.

During the last few years, you've seen reporters coming into public relations, joining sales departments and major shifts at analysts firms. Most recently, we saw long time technology editor of eWeek, Peter Coffee land with Salesforce.com. We also saw Line56.com go down for the count and Intelligent Enterprise move to a online only site. Most notably, we saw media giants including Time Inc. and New York Times announcing recent shrinkage.

While publications are struggling to find revenue streams from online content that has stolen the audience from getting their "fingers dirty," PR somehow is enjoying a period of steady growth. However, it will be interesting how this one plays out. Clearly, charging for archives isn't the answer and neither is ad relevancy.




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