Attendance at Nexpo 2008 may mirror the industry’s overall declining fortunes, according to Newspapers & Technology’s annual Nexpo survey.

For the first time since Newspapers & Technology has conducted the survey, a higher percentage of respondents — 54 percent — said they would not attend this year’s show, scheduled for April 12-15 in Washington, D.C.

 

The 46 percent of respondents who said they would attend represents an 8 percent drop from our 2007 survey.

Budget constraints led the list of reasons respondents gave for not being able to travel to Washington, D.C., with 36 percent saying slashed budgets wouldn’t permit any travel. Another 20 percent said it’s too expensive for them to travel to the East Coast for the three-day show.

Respondents also said their budgets for equipment are under pressure, with 61 percent saying funds to buy new equipment and technologies have been reduced this year.

Of those who are planning to attend Nexpo, respondents said they would likely send the same amount of people, an average of three, as they did last year to Orlando, Fla.

Nexpo ’07, in fact, garnered high praise from those who attended the show. Some 73 percent said they were satisfied with the convention, a slight dip from the 80 percent who expressed a similar opinion about the 2006 show in Chicago.

Still looking

Although attendance may be down, respondents said they are still interested in technologies and services that will help them operate more efficiently and attract new revenues. This year, postpress, computer-to-plate and prepress technologies ranked as the key products they believe will provide their newspapers with the most benefits.

Postpress in particular is winning attention among papers eager to position their postproduction operations as a revenue-generator, particularly as they woo commercial accounts.

Online technology, meantime, is another area respondents say they will examine. Software tailored to support electronic editions appears to be the most popular, with self-service apps for advertising and circulation ranked in second place. Mobile technology is also popular, but respondents expressed less excitement about social networking, video and blogging software.

The lukewarm response about emerging technologies may be due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of respondents attending Nexpo are not the managers or executives that would attend the NAA Marketing Conference, where vendors offering Web 2.0-type apps tend to congregate. In fact, only 1 percent of those responding to the Newspapers & Technology survey said they also intended to attend the 2008 Marketing Conference.

Nexpo and the Marketing Conference will be combined beginning next year.

Finally, the survey indicated that managers and executives are almost evenly split about their perceptions of the newspaper industry overall in 2008. Fifty-three percent said they are either troubled or pessimistic about newspapers, while 47 percent said they were confident or somewhat confident.