From CP via CTV.ca: (posted Jan. 30)

As advertising revenues evaporate at a merciless pace, Canadian newspapers have had to slash jobs and shutter divisions to keep afloat, with rising online ad sales providing a much-needed lifeline as they transition to new technology.

But with U.S. media bellwether the New York Times posting weaker quarterly Internet ad sales for the first time ever earlier this week, there are signs that going online may not be enough of a shield for traditional media players.

Companies are tightening their ad budgets and the impact of that is widening fast, said Rob Young, senior vice-president of planning services at Toronto-based research agency PHD Canada.

He predicts that newspaper advertising revenues will slump in 2009 at a staggering pace, possibly worse than in the past three recessions he's witnessed as a media observer.

"This one, I suspect, will be deeper in terms of ad revenue impact than the other three," he said.

Newspapers companies are making a mistake in assuming that a shift in focus to the Internet alone will rescue their business model, Young said. He believes they need to find a way to persuade younger readers to pick up newspapers, which would in turn benefit advertisers.

Here's where Young's argument breaks down:

A newspaper has "the ability to reach a large proportion of the population in a day that makes it such an attractive advertising vehicle," he said.

"It's that ability to get an advertising message out to 65 per cent of the population in one day that's hard to replicate in any medium, including the Internet."

Those days are gone for the foreseeable future (or until someone much, much smarter than me figures out a way to bring them back).

Newspapers could hold a grip on a large percentage once upon a time because there were relatively few distribution channels. Now there's a wealth of them.

What young people might regard as gripping news is much different than what traditional newspapers might want, both in content and style of delivery.

Aggregating 65 per cent of the audience in a given population on a given day is, I would suggest, an exceedingly difficult task in today's media environment.