Tem alguns meses mas vale a pena ler, até porque a conclusão é tão "ao contrário" do que se vê por cá e parece fazer muito sentido...
Investing in the Newsroom is Good for Business: The team of researchers focused on three areas of operation - news quality; distribution and circulation; and advertising - by analyzing financial data of small- to medium-sized newspapers with circulations of 85,000 or less. Research revealed that news quality most directly affects bottom line.
"The most important finding is that newspapers are under spending in the newsroom and over spending in circulation and advertising," Thorson said. "If you invest more in the newsroom, do you make more money? The answer is yes. If you lower the amount of money spent in the newsroom, then pretty soon the news product becomes so bad that you begin to lose money." [...]
What they discovered is that during down cycles, newspapers generally focus more on increasing advertising sales and boosting circulation. With the popularity of the Internet and specialized Web sites, Thorson said newspapers have lost some of their advertising appeal with high-dollar advertisers, such as automobile dealerships and major retail establishments. She said classified advertising also isn't as reliable because readers now search online for jobs, houses and various niche items. As societal norms and preferences change, Thorson said "newspaper revenues are increasingly threatened." [...]
"By looking at the data, investing in news quality does pay off," Mantrala said. "It improves circulation and advertising revenues, which are the bulk of a newspaper's revenues. Better news quality drives circulation and circulation drives advertising revenues."
The study, "Uphill or Downhill? Locating Your Firm on a Profit Function," will be published in the April issue of the Journal of Marketing.
Presumo que seja este o estudo (de 2006, cito parte das conclusões):
Uphill or Downhill? Locating Your Firm on a Profit Function: the four key takeaways from this paper are as follows:
(i) daily newspapers’ dual revenues are interrelated with positive feedback effects; this is a common assumption in theoretical models but backed by limited empirical evidence to date.
(ii) Investments in news quality not only impact subscription sales directly, but also advertising revenues via subscriptions indirectly. This result is especially true for smaller circulation newspapers whose newsrooms and editorial departments tend to be understaffed and overworked. Consequently, our answer to the question “Is good news quality good business?” is a resounding “Yes.”
(iii) Advertising revenues of both small and large firms positively respond to efforts to directly boost circulation, e.g., investment in news quality, as much as they respond to advertising space selling effort.
(iv) Investments in circulation-distribution also have significant direct and indirect effects on subscriptions and advertising revenues respectively, although the strengths of these effects are not as high as those of news quality investments
[act.: a ler também esta "Análise económica e financeira do sector dos media em Portugal"]
