ChasNote

That’s what the New York Post did yesterday. “Today’s New York Post is greener with less paper and fewer ads. Enjoy.”

Actually, I bet the Post made more money yesterday by dropping a bunch of standard ads in exchange for a more lucrative sponsorship idea. Great move on all fronts. Less advertising clutter, so the ads will likely to work better for the sponsor, the cable channel Planet Green. Readers, I bet, also prefer the lighter advertising mix. And, hey, you can’t dispute the claim that fewer total newspaper pages is better for the tree population.

The trees may be safer, but don’t count on the Post going soft on its other victims.

AdAge is launching a series of articles tracking the efforts of America’s 1,437 daily newspapers as they attempt to get their mojo (and revenues) back. The grim math by Annenberg’s Jeffrey Cole goes like this:

“‘When an offline reader of a paper dies, he or she is not being replaced by a new reader,’ he said. ‘How much time do they have? We think they have 20 to 25 years.’”

The series will also watch what the Project for Excellence in Journalism calls “decoupling of news and advertising.”

Here’s Battelle from a piece he contributed to American Express’s blog on the decoupling of content creation from advertising, about a month before the piece by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Some chart candy from Global Insights, originally published in BusinessWeek. Overall investment is up 2%, with the online segment up nearly 26%, broadcast TV down 1.5% and newspapers down more than 6%.

The Newspaper Association of American says the decline in newspaper print ads — ad revenues were down 9.4 percent — was the worst on record. Worse than 2001. Worse than 1991. More at Paid Content.

Not much good news for print newspapers, according to Eric Alterman’s piece in the New Yorker.

“Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago…. [T]rends in circulation and advertising––the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising––have created a palpable sense of doom. Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two per cent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter.”