It should be a fairly merry Christmas for local media with good web operations, says Media Life:
Though slower to take off, local internet advertising has been soaring in recent years as local companies, traditionally cautious in their ad spending, began to see the cost-savings potential of the internet over traditional media.
Earlier this year, Borrell Associates, which tracks local online spending, forecast that local internet spending would grow about 47 percent this year but slow dramatically in 2009, to 8 percent growth.
The rise of local online advertising has put pressure on traditional local media, especially newspapers, which were already struggling from the migration of readers to the internet well before the surge in advertising revenue shifting to local internet competitors.
And now, on top of this, there’s the recession, which is hitting all local media but especially local papers.
It’s a great time to be a news consumer, and a terrible time to be trying to maintain a local monopoly newspaper. That’s a good thing.