Surprise.
United States newspapers had a healthy 12% profit in 2008.
And a 15% profit for newspapers with less than 15,000 copies.
The Inland study shows, Alan Mutter says, that “Compared with other industries, however, publishers on average still are doing remarkably well… A 12% profit margin is more than double that achieved last year by Wal-Mart Stores, the largest of the Fortune 1,000 companies. A 12% pre-tax profit is just about a percentage point light of the margins run by Exxon and Chevron, the second and third largest corporations behind Wal-Mart on the Fortune list.”
UPDATE: The Inland Press Association today reissued the summary of the study on which this post was based. The major change is that 12% is the average profitability of large newspapers in the last five years, not solely in 2008.
