From PaidContent.org:

 For the most part, The Washington Post Co. (NYSE: WPO) had a pretty good Q1—except, of course, for the magazine division (i.e., Newsweek), which saw revenue plunge 36 percent to $29.4 million. While Newsweek had a for sale sign hung on it this week, the newspaper division’s troubles have sharply abated. In Q1, newspaper revs declined 3 percent, a vast improvement over last year’s deep 22 percent drop. But the good news on the newspaper publishing side, which is primarily represented by WaPo’s flagship, came from the web, as display revs jumped 17 percent. (For more details on Newsweek’s dismal Q1, see Staci D. Kramer’s piece here.)

Earlier this week, the WaPo’s online-only Slate Group said that its ad revenues were up 52 percent. The positive results at Slate, which is part of the newspaper division, weren’t able to obscure the continued struggles for its print-based sibling as the washingtonpost.com’s classified sales were down 22 percent, hardly better than Q109’s 23 percent fall.

Here’s a snapshot of the newspaper division’s during Q1:

—Print ad revenue at The Washington Post fell 8 percent to $68.7 million, largely due to pullback in general and retail advertising.

—The paper’s daily circ dropped 12.5 percent, while Sunday circulation slid 10.4 percent. The company blamed it on the abnormally higher circ surrounding the news around last year’s presidential inauguration.

—The division posted an operating loss of $13.8 million, considerable improvement over last year’s $53.8 million loss.

Overall, net income was $45.4 million ($4.91 per share) versus the $19.2 million ($2.04 loss per share) net loss in Q109. As usual, the company’s strength came from its cable and education units.

New York—The readers of Dow Jones & co.'s The Wall Street Journal have the highest median annual household income ($135,740) among print publications, according to Mediamark Research & Intelligence's MRI Fall 2009 report, which was released this week.

Twelve other print publications had readership with median household income above $100,000, which indicates a business-oriented audience. The other 12 are: Barron's ($126,710); The Economist ($124,701); United Hemispheres ($120,809); Washington Post Sunday ($120,400); The New York Times Sunday ($118,471); The New York Times daily ($115,816); American Way ($108,522); Condé Nast Traveler ($106,407); The Atlantic ($104,786); Southwest Spirit ($102,505); Architectural Digest ($101,159); and Yachting ($100,740).

Full story here

From today's New York Times comes this story of how newspaper web sites are having trouble attracting larger brand advertisers consistently.The reason boils down to two problems we have spoken about on this blog many times - newspaper sites are too expensive and the ability to target is poor.

Full story here.

Part of the story:

It was a good day for newspaper Web sites when Mercedes-Benz USA introduced its updated E-Class cars this summer. Mercedes bought out the ad space on the home pages of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and had those sites create special 3-D ads for them, at an estimated cost of $100,000 a site.

The days after were not as good. While Mercedes was happy with the newspaper sites’ performance, it shifted money to cheaper, more tightly aimed ads bought through networks, which bundle ad space from many Web sites.

When Mercedes advertises its more basic models next year, it will largely avoid newspaper Web sites and rely on networks. That lets Mercedes “be very targeted and efficient with our dollars,” said Beth Lange, digital media specialist for Mercedes-Benz USA.

But that also explains why newspaper sites are not holding on to ad dollars, even while overall Internet advertising is creeping back. Newspaper sites are the patent-leather stilettos of the online world: they get used for special occasions, but other shoes get much more daily wear. The beneficiaries of this behavior are networks and exchanges like Advertising.com from AOL and DoubleClick Ad Exchange from Google, which dominate the buying and selling of extra space.