Newspaper ad sales skid for seventh straight year

Advertising sales, the predominant revenue stream for the newspaper industry, dropped for the seventh year in a row in 2012, falling to less than half the record $49.4 billion achieved as recently as 2005.

More on that in a moment.  But first, let’s put things in perspective by comparing the meteoric rise of Google, the definitive digital media company, with the epic collapse that has cut the