Will Newspapers Survive?

News Corporation boss Rupert Murdoch told the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital conference that print newspapers would outlast him. Not so sure. Industry analyst Mark Potts has been telling clients that rising online advertising will finally offset the decline of print revenues by about 2012. (That's his chart on the right, with online revenue in red making up for the shrinking blue, so overtaken by events that it now represents the optimistic scenario.) But the American Journalism Review challenges Potts' assumptions: traditional newspaper revenues are declining more rapidly than the analyst predicted; and the AJR's Charles Layton reckons their websites will never make up the difference (see left). Ouch.