Online audience growth: not a solution to newspapers’ problems?

There’s an inter­est­ing look at the prob­lems of news­pa­pers online by Robert Ivan at Seek­ing Alpha, focus­ing on the New York Times. I don’t know about the assump­tions — I’ve seen the cost of the NYT’s news­gath­er­ing put at $200m — and I’ve sim­pli­fied it a little, but here it is:

Des­pite the highest read­er­ship of any news­pa­per in the United States, the New York Times only gen­er­ated $330 mil­lion in online advert­ising in 2007. Total oper­at­ing costs for that same year totaled $2.9 billion.

It is widely repor­ted that total news­pa­per oper­at­ing costs would be reduced by 35% if news­pa­pers elim­in­ated their print product [is that assump­tion really right?]. Using the NYT example … costs could be reduced to $1.9 bil­lion. Con­tinue read­ing