“The double dip recession that will hit the world economy in 2012 will bring Europe’s newspapers publishers into red figures. It could get worse and it will create at best another wave of consolidation in the publishing markets, and more likely more deaths of newspapers”.

Waller studied a number of large, mid-size and small newspapers and projected how they would fare in the next years, revenue-wise. And in the wave of the coming recession the figures are quite depressing. Large newspapers (over 200,000 in circulation) will lose 20% in classified revenues, 10% in ad display and 1% in circulation. For mid-size newspapers the figures are similar, while the smaller newspapers of his panel (less than 50,000) are losing 5% in advertising.

Companies must prepare themselves for a tough economy. But Waller stresses that shareholders should no longer accept cost cutting as a management answer to advertising downturn because cost cutting will never save a company in the long term.

They will need to plan investment to bring digital activities at all top positions of their business and increase resources in this area. Advertisers go where the readers are, and the only readership rising since more than 10 years is in the digital area. And it is only realistic to consider that advertisers will speed up their shift from print to digital in the coming years. Google ad formats, Groupon’s 100%-performance based ads-concept; Facebooks activities, vertical Classifieds will take an increasing share of the advertising market. “At all levels of the publishing company there should be a digital all-channel workflow,” says Waller.

News organization that did little restructuring and had no clear digital strategy in the last years will become the targets in the coming wave of industry consolidation, and so will the companies that are basing their digital revenues purely on online advertising.

“Investors will look at those companies because they know that they can leverage those acquisitions by implementing a missing source of revenue: paid content”.

The sector, concludes Waller, needs investors who value the opportunities of digital transformation and understand the need to invest.