Newsquest Sees Property Classifieds Nightmare Stabilising

Regional news publisher Newsquest is still losing money, but its losses are now easing. Its Q4 2009 revenue was down 17.9 percent from the previous year’s quarter – but it’s 11 percent higher than Q3, “driven by a steady improvement in real estate classified”.

Newsquest’s 200+ UK papers lost 38.5 percent of their job classifieds income and 26.9 percent of cars small ads, however.

UK financial details weren’t published by U.S. parent Gannett (NYSE: GCI), which itself reported one percent higher pre-tax quarterly income of $273.3 million, thanks to “stabilisation” of economies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Gannett’s digital revenue dipped seven percent to $157.7 million because job ads site CareerBuilder suffered in recession-time jobs slump. But Newsquest’s digital revenue is not broken out.

Gannett says Newsquest websites have 6.7 million monthly unique users and 66 million page views.

More at paidContent.org.