This is a cautionary tale for those of you who gripe about “all the ads” in your daily newspaper. When the truth is that the dramatic decline in advertising revenue over the past decade or so is what has been strangling newspapers.
It’s why Robert Ariail and I, and a bunch of others, got laid off in 2009, at the very low point of the Great Recession.
Greet those ads as friends, because those that remain are all you have to keep the news flowing your way — no matter where you get your news. The few reporters left at mid-sized dailies across the country — and at virtually every other information outlet you can think of — get paid from ad revenues. It was always thus, only in the old days there was a lot more flowing in.
No bucks, no Buck Rogers. Or perhaps I should say, no Clark Kent.
There are readers out there who labor under the delusion that they pay for their paper, so they shouldn’t be assaulted with all these ads. Well, no they don’t — pay for it, that is. Oh, they pay something, but it’s a pittance compared to what it costs to publish a newspaper. The rest comes from advertising.
And contrary to the equally deluded belief of folks who imagine that ads make the news somehow hostage to the interests of advertisers (which just proves they’ve never worked at a general-circulation newspaper in this country), advertising is also what keeps news free and independent. As we’re seeing in Russia:
MOSCOW — An advertising ban on Russian cable and satellite TV stations could decimate regional television broadcasting from the suburbs of the capital to the far reaches of Siberia, leaving the country almost entirely dependent on state media for news and information.
The law, which will prohibit commercial advertisements on paid cable and satellite channels starting next year, is one of many measures Russian authorities have adopted in recent months to tighten control over the flow of information, reduce foreign money in Russian media and force journalists to hew closer to a pro-Kremlin line.
But the advertising ban threatens to deliver the most devastating blow to homegrown independent outlets where Russians get most of their news: television….
When newspapers and other news outlets lose their access to advertising in a place like Russia, the news becomes, once again, a wholly owned subsidiary of the government.
So enjoy the ads, folks. They’re better than the alternatives…
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Are you for or against The State having a paywall on their online site?
Well… newspapers made a strategic mistake when they first put their content online — they made it free. It was a nice convenience for their readers. And so lots of people quit taking the paper, because they could get it free online. That undermined the business model, NOT because of the loss of circulation revenue, but because your ad rates are based on your audited paid circulation.
So then we went through a period in which only the biggest and bravest papers tried to demand payment — the others were scared to, since it would encourage readers to go to competitors who still gave it away free — and then gradually the medium-sized papers started trying pay walls, keeping their eyes on each other as they did so.
Here’s what I said back in the 90s, only nobody on the business side ever listened to me: I said we should grant full access — including free access to all archives (which to me is the most valuable thing about getting news electronically; it doesn’t go away, so you can look up ANYTHING) — to readers with 7-day subscriptions to the actual paper. Don’t subscribe, and you get less online.
Actually, I think what I suggested was free access to all to TODAY’S news, but the archives only for subscribers. What I SHOULD have advocated was full access to today’s news only for subscribers.
I think that could have done a lot to stanch the bleeding…
Years ago, the German daily, Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ), did what you suggested: allowing only subscribers to access to its articles online. If you went to their site as a non-subscriber, all you would see was a little box that read something like, We produce quality reporting and believe it should be paid for. That didn’t last. Now they offer as much free access to online material (I hate the word “content”) as most other papers do.
Well, I occasionally follow links to various newspapers and magazines, and would never subscribe to read what was there–I just don’t go these places much. Sometimes I might be willing pay a dollar, say, to read an article I really really want to see, but most often, not. I don’t know a better model than the “a few free, then you pay” one.
Freedom’s just another word for
ads for “Amish fireplaces” and “free” sacks of coins for a “low ” fee for the bag…
and chiropractors promising cures for things other than bad backs,,,
Actually, I thought all chiropractors were about healing beyond the back. They believe that by setting things right in the spinal column, they can affect the whole body. As Wikipedia has it, “Chiropractic is a form of alternative medicine[1] that emphasizes diagnosis, treatment and prevention of mechanical disorders of the musculoskeletal system, especially the spine, under the belief that these disorders affect general health via the nervous system.”
I’m less concerned about the amount of advertising in the daily paper than I am about the amount of actual news reporting I find there — at least that’s the case with the daily paper I’m most familiar with: The Greenville News. The latter seems to have shrunk as the former has grown.
But I’m also familiar with dailies overseas — in particular in Germany, where I’ve lived. News dailies there simply do not have anything like the amount of advertising found in the typical US paper — and often have none at all embedded in the news sections themselves. This applies not only to national and regional papers but to small local papers as well. Plus, they often contain much more hard news reporting (and less human interest or “fluff”) than most American papers do — including, most importantly, reporting on state and local affairs, which seems very much on the decline in most traditional American dailies. Not a good development for American democracy.
Well, the amount of space for news — and the numbers of reporters and editors available to report the news — depends on the amount of advertising.
You mention “none at all embedded in the news sections themselves.” That’s called ROP advertising — run of press — and it’s the best, most profitable kind.
For years, we resisted advertisers going to inserts — those separate sections that fall out of your paper — for two reasons: We made less money on them than we did on ROP, and they freed up the advertiser to distribute them by direct mail or in-store. But eventually, we were happy to have ANY advertising, so the number of inserts grew…
Yes, those inserts definitely have grown! On Sundays, I have to dig through them to find the newspaper. I KNOW it’s in there somewhere!
But returning to overseas press again for just a moment: Given the lack of ROP (and inserts, though there are some) in the German newspapers I’ve seen, I’d be curious what sort of business model they operate on (or perhaps I should say readership model?), because it’s apparently not the same as that of most US dailies, given the different approaches to advertising. As I pointed out before, they usually have more reporting, generally offer a wider range of coverage and in some cases even use smaller fonts in order to squeeze in more lines per page.
Yeah, I switched to (paid) digital, and I love the ease of just turning off my iPad Mini, instead of corraling all those inserts and having to haul two more bins of recycling to the curb.
I only read newspapers on the iPad now.
Except for the Wall Street Journal. I let my subscription lapse, and now the only time I get to read it is when I read one of the copies at Cap City.
These days, my paid subscriptions are to The State and to The Washington Post. The Post gave an awesome deal — $39 for a year. When the WSJ offers me a deal like that, I’ll subscribe to that again, too. I miss it…
“ad rates are based on your audited paid circulation”
So how would a local like Free Times set its rates? There’s zero paid circulation, and it seems like there are always copies left over on Tuesday before the next edition on Wednesday, so counting distribution can be manipulated.
Advertising in newspapers and on TV has never bothered me much with one exception–I hate auto dealers’ commercials that try to show some sort of local “character” by yelling at me, throwing cash at the camera, and dressing funny. I wonder how out-of-towners respond when they see some of these nutcases. But then I turn on the TV in some other location and see some of the same nonsense.
Ad rates are calculated by numbers of “views” or potential impressions. Every newspaper subscription is assumed to have two or three readers, particularly home delivery, whilst free papers are judged by the numbers that disappear from their racks. One aspect of the Great Newspaper Meltdown of the late Aughts was much tighter accounting of street sales and rack distribution.
Brad is right, news didn’t fail, advertising did and dragged papers down with them. And frankly, Craigslist is a better medium for the customer than printed classifieds.
Yes. The demand for news and commentary, via the written word, is as strong as ever. Trouble is, newspapers were financed NOT by the transaction between journalists and readers, but by a whole separate transaction with a third party — advertisers.
Back in the 80s, a long, slow process began, of advertisers pulling away from mass media and directly targeting consumers. They did it first with direct mail. Those plastic tags on your keychain, that get swiped at the checkout for discounts, collect data on you so that the store can market directly to you.
Then the internet greatly accelerated the process. Of course, the Web is an awesome medium for us — we save on those horrific printing and delivery costs. But the online market won’t bear the kinds of rates that we charged for print ads.
So, we have this weird situation in which there’s huge demand for news, and better ways than ever for delivering it — but the business model has largely collapsed.