The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) is predicting a moderate growth of just under 1% in advertising revenues for 2002, president and chief executive John F. Sturm, told a conference at the end of last week. “Don’t look for a bounce, but a slow crawl,” he is quoted by TechNews as telling delegates.
By the end of last year US retail advertising was off by almost 4%, national was down by nearly 11% and classified had declined by just under 17%. All of these figures were much poorer than the worse case scenarios that had been predicted just months earlier.
The dotcom slump, retracting consumer spending and the 11 September attacks all contributed to the declining advertising revenues that have affected newspapers both in the US and in the UK.
