MediaMemo has the numbers on print ads for the last three months, and they are pretty ugly - these numbers are in comparison to the same time in 2008:

Publishing advertising revenue: Down 34.1% (or down 29.8% if you exclude currency fluctuation).

Classified ad revenue: Down 46.5%.

USA Today ad revenue: Down 33.5%

TV revenue: Down 14.9%.

Now admittedly, a soft economy plays into that some - but I think it's simply accelerating the trend of ads moving online, and for those ads to be both more targeted and lower cost. It's not so much that print is dying, as it is that the broadcast model of advertising it has relied on is dying.

There was a conversation about this on "This Week in Tech" last Sunday that I agreed with. Basically, any company advertising on that show has a very good idea as to who the audience is - so ads for, say, audio books are a pretty good bet. It's much, much harder to come up with useful ads for a more general broadcast audience. There's also the fact that Leop Laporte is using a more conversational and believable model of advertising - he's plugging things he actually uses and likes, which makes them even more credible for his audience.

That's the model of advertising that I think still works - the broadcast model used by traditional media is having serious problems, and any business that relies on that model - like most newspapers - is going to be in a world of hurt.

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