Henry Blodget says:

“If your career, portfolio, or fortune isn’t tied to the newspaper business, however, rejoice. The newspaper industry’s loss is your gain!In ten years, print-paper circulation and ad revenue will likely be a quarter of what it is today, if that.

Why? Because:

• • As circulations and ad revenue continue to fall, print economies-of-scale will reverse, cutting further into already shrinking print margins.
  • As “green business” practices take hold, a new generation of consumers will come to view the newspaper industry as a horrifically wasteful polluter that eats forests, gobbles fuel and electricity, and farts untold amounts of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere–all to deliver information that might have been interesting yesterday.
  • A generation of newspaper ad salespeople and ad sales buyers will gradually retire or quit, and advertisers will increasingly ask themselves why they are spending billions on ads they have no idea whether anyone looks at.
  • As financial and environmental pressures increase and a better grasp of reality sets in, more papers will opt to do what the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, did last weekend: Shut down their print businesses, fire a third of their staff, and put what’s left online.” Read More

From PaidContent.org:

– All about scale: Alan Schanzer, managing partner, at WPP Group’s MEC Interaction said this deal won’t affect the current TV marketplace negotiations but it will help CBS follow through on the emphasis it gave to “the portability of content” at Wednesday’s upfront presentation. Schanzer: “It gives them more places to showcase their programming or invite audiences back to view their programming. This is where scale becomes critically important. It’s not always going to be the case where people go home and turn on their TV to watch CBS. It will be much more about CBS going out to this mass audience of people and saying we have this content, come watch it. That’s why we think the blended marketplace that this deal creates is so interesting, because the flow of content works in both directions.” >Read More