Howard Owens quotes from Vin Crosbie. The post is about video but it applies to print -- heck, it applies to any medium.
"The overabundance of suppliers of news and information ... leads to another corollary, one that might seem to be counter-intuitive: the ‘good enough’ beats perfect. The overabundance of suppliers leads to competition that actually lowers the threshold of acceptable quality. When there were few suppliers, they used higher quality content (i.e., ‘high production values’) as a competitive weapon against each other. But now that there is an overabundance of suppliers, their competition levers towards being the first to produce content that is at least of acceptable quality.
"Millions of videos are viewed billions of times each month on sites such as YouTube.com (+3 billion per month) not because of high production values, but because the videos are at least ‘good enough’ to watch. The production of higher quality delays distribution and widespread usage. This corollary runs against the grain of traditional Mass Media organizations, which tend to delay release of their content until it is perfect, but the effect of this corollary is an observable phenomenon."
A lot of the problem we copy editors have been having with Web content is: How can you put that stuff out there? It's not good. The problem is that most of it is not really awful, either. It's just not very good, as good as it could be, as good as we know we could make it, and that makes us uneasy. But, without seeing all of Crosbie's post (for some reason I can't get to it), there are two things not addressed in this excerpt.
The ubiquity of digital communications has led to a change in attitude: Why SHOULDN'T I read it, look at it, whatever. It's free! If I'm bored in six seconds, I can blink it off. No charge. "Good enough" becomes good enough not just because of the ubiquity of content but because my investment is nearly zero. Whereas, if I actually had to pay for it, in money or time, I'd set a higher standard and ignore more of it. "Higher production values" were not just a way for NBC to try to trump CBS or AP to top UPI; they were a way to get you to stay put for a half-hour news show or pay more for a wire service for your newspaper. (If you've watched a bush-league TV station on a holiday weekend and found yourself laughing, you know that production values matter; but you've already made the investment of time in sitting down in front of the television. On the Web, you're probably doing something else, or able to do something else, at the same time, so your investment is much less. In so many cases, it's simply providing you with something to do to avoid doing something you don't want to do.)
But think of digital phones, which have worse sound quality compared with most landlines -- not awful, just not as good -- and are far more prone to skips and disconnects. And while it depends a lot on what sort of peripherals you buy, for years the quality of sound coming out of a computer was worse that the sound even a 1980s stereo system could provide. Yet -- it didn't seem to matter. Immediacy clearly trumps quality -- I can barely understand you, but I'd rather be frustrated by the phone than miss your party tonight. What is unknown is if this is transitory. Three years from now, will people just be looking at YouTube videos because someone sent them a link saying "You should watch this," or will that appetite have been sated (hey, honey, there's nothing else on TV, let's watch the test pattern) and there will be renewed competition on quality, particularly as each cohort passes out of adolescence in which everything is new again? Or does "anything other than being bored or out of the loop" hold the trump card?
So this is part of why copy desks are not faring particularly well, even though one would think a newspaper would say, "Our selling point in this media landscape is: Quality." The O.J. car chase proved that people will watch or read anything in which something might happen, for fear of missing it if it did. Most newspapers just started posting stuff on the Web without benefit of copy editors -- doing it on the cheap, not any thought-out strategy -- and thus discovered that "good enough" stories are just as effective on the Web as "really good" stories. And if there, why not everywhere? If the typical print newspaper is being read and disposed of in 20 minutes, what level of quality is really necessary? I can't recall a newspaper ever selling itself as "America's best copy edited."
But it was the concept of the newspaper as the most trusted source of news and therefore of its ads as carrying added value from being in the publication of record that led to newspapers' fixation on accuracy and quality. You trusted The Salt Lake Tribune, therefore you trusted its ads for ZCMI and Auerbach's -- and you particularly trusted its classified advertising, which could have been placed by anyone. (You also trusted clothes from a department store more than you did from Jack's Low-End Shirt Shop. Once the quality of nearly everything became about the same, this began to matter less.)
We have not yet really grappled as a culture with what it means when there is no fixed record, no stopping and starting point, just an endlessly mutable conversation. We do know which medium makes an ad incredibly cheap. But what sort of environment today makes one advertiser's message be seen as more trustworthy, a traditional added value of newspaper advertising? Or is that no longer material? It seems from some early research I've seen (and am not going to take an hour to find it and link to it, you just have to trust me) as if newspapers still have some advantage in that realm, both in print and online; that the brand is still seen as "reputable" and that that counts for something; but for what? Any ideas?
Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The News in 1967 -- Prelude
The Burlington County Times, one of our local newspapers, has an interesting story. Unlike most dailies, it did not grow out of a weekly or have its base in an established community. It owes its existence to William Levitt.
Having built Levittowns on Long Island and in Bucks County, Pa., Levitt looked to Burlington County for his third community (and final one on the U.S. mainland). He selected Willingboro Township, a rural area halfway between Philadelphia and Trenton and right across a bridge from Levittown, Pa. Levitt had learned from his mistake in Pennsylvania, where his community went across township lines and thus he needed approval from many levels of government. In Willingboro he would deal with one community.
His ambition had grown as well. Long Island was basically a huge subdivision, but starting with Pennsylvania he aimed to build not just subdivisions, but complete communities -- not just with schools and parks, but with shopping, movies, newspapers -- ready-made towns. In Levittown, Pa., he had convinced Pomeroy's, the Reading-based Allied Stores operator of department stores in eastern Pennsylvania, to be an anchor of the Shop-A-Rama. (Pomeroy's even developed a separate store logo for its new division.) Pomeroy's would also have a store in Willingboro.
In 1954, Stanley Calkins, publisher of newspapers in western Pennsylvania, had bought the Bristol Courier from Bucks County's political boss, Joseph Grundy. Calkins then purchased a weekly serving Levittown and created the Bucks County Courier Times. It was a natural for Calkins to be involved in creating a newspaper for the third Levittown as well. But while Levittown, Pa., was near Bristol and its established daily, the new Levittown, N.J., was in a county served only by weeklies. And the nearest towns, Burlington and Riverside, were hardly retail hubs.
The challenge was clear. The Willingboro Levittown -- it only briefly legally adopted the name of Levittown and was back to Willingboro by 1963 -- was to become the hub of Burlington County; the Fox Theater relocated there from Burlington (in a Levitt building) and the Plaza, with Pomeroy's and Sears as anchors, was to be the largest shopping area between the new South Jersey malls (Cherry Hill and Moorestown) and Trenton. That meant that once the early excitement of thousands of families establishing new homes in Willingboro was over, the mall had to draw from Mount Holly and Edgewater Park and Fort Dix. That meant the newspaper had to pull people from around the county to Willingboro as well as taking whatever ads came from stores in the established towns. In essence, the developer and the newspaper were creating a regional market where none had existed before.
The Burlington County Times is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, having been established in 1958 when the first families began moving into their Levitt houses in Willingboro.
On the one hand, the BCT had a blank slate -- it had no longtime readers to alienate with changes, as it had no readers at all. On the other hand, it was being made up and printed at the Bucks County plant until it was firmly enough established to have its own, so it had to conform to the basic makeup of that newspaper. And it had to conform to reader expectations of a newspaper so that people would not reject it in favor of the Philadelphia or Trenton papers, while recognizing that many people would take the larger papers anyway. Quite a challenge, and one that easily could have not been met. Yet the BCT sunk its roots and established itself as a paper for a county without a traditional center. It had to offer its readers what they wanted from the start. So what did it offer them?
By the fall of 1967, the nine-year-old BCT, which published Monday through Saturday afternoons, was running one or two pages of "women's news," two clear pages of editorials and news features -- the op-ed page was not filled with pundits but with in-depth wire stories as well as Dear Abby -- three or four pages (with ads) of sports, a couple of pages of comics and puzzles, and general news pages to fit the ads. A Monday might have eight to 10 news pages, a Wednesday or Thursday around 25. Page 3 was always open, but everything from there to the comics pages was clearly determined by how many ads there were. What was the news-to-ad ratio? No idea, but 60 percent news looked like a stretch. It was probably 50-50.
This was an afternoon paper, so the only way it got out the door in those days of Linotypes and stereotypers was for many of the pages to be made up the day before. Just a few pages would be reserved for breaking news, and the back pages had to consist of wire or local stories that would not change overnight. The front page would be made up late, so it would have to have a couple of "not really front page stories" available to fill it out when local copy ran short or didn't happen. But generally, as a local afternoon paper, only the most essential or interesting wire stories would get in. On one Thursday in mid-October, this meant there were nine stories on A1. Only two jumped.
This Thursday's paper -- in a typical week, no election ads, no pre-Christmas runup, just an ordinary paper -- had about 56 columns of general news (it was an eight-column page). Women's news added 10 columns and, perhaps most shocking by today's standards, Sports had 11 -- the equivalent of two pages today. This didn't take into account the comics and puzzles. There were four pages of classified, but again, the pages were wider.
Readers looking for advertising on this Thursday -- a Best Food Day, as we used to call it -- got ads for the major groceries. Sears took six pages, and Pomeroy's probably accounted for three although its ads were scattered. Other display advertisers included a carpet store, a paint store, an optometrist, a fabric store, discount stores, a beauty salon, a bank, a children's clothing shop and two tire stores -- the same odd collection of advertisers local newspapers have today. (If your memory goes back this far, the major movies playing were "Dr. Zhivago," "Up the Down Staircase," "The Sound of Music" and "A Man for All Seasons.")
But what news did the paper provide its readers as it continued to sink its roots into its county? Next post.
Having built Levittowns on Long Island and in Bucks County, Pa., Levitt looked to Burlington County for his third community (and final one on the U.S. mainland). He selected Willingboro Township, a rural area halfway between Philadelphia and Trenton and right across a bridge from Levittown, Pa. Levitt had learned from his mistake in Pennsylvania, where his community went across township lines and thus he needed approval from many levels of government. In Willingboro he would deal with one community.
His ambition had grown as well. Long Island was basically a huge subdivision, but starting with Pennsylvania he aimed to build not just subdivisions, but complete communities -- not just with schools and parks, but with shopping, movies, newspapers -- ready-made towns. In Levittown, Pa., he had convinced Pomeroy's, the Reading-based Allied Stores operator of department stores in eastern Pennsylvania, to be an anchor of the Shop-A-Rama. (Pomeroy's even developed a separate store logo for its new division.) Pomeroy's would also have a store in Willingboro.
In 1954, Stanley Calkins, publisher of newspapers in western Pennsylvania, had bought the Bristol Courier from Bucks County's political boss, Joseph Grundy. Calkins then purchased a weekly serving Levittown and created the Bucks County Courier Times. It was a natural for Calkins to be involved in creating a newspaper for the third Levittown as well. But while Levittown, Pa., was near Bristol and its established daily, the new Levittown, N.J., was in a county served only by weeklies. And the nearest towns, Burlington and Riverside, were hardly retail hubs.
The challenge was clear. The Willingboro Levittown -- it only briefly legally adopted the name of Levittown and was back to Willingboro by 1963 -- was to become the hub of Burlington County; the Fox Theater relocated there from Burlington (in a Levitt building) and the Plaza, with Pomeroy's and Sears as anchors, was to be the largest shopping area between the new South Jersey malls (Cherry Hill and Moorestown) and Trenton. That meant that once the early excitement of thousands of families establishing new homes in Willingboro was over, the mall had to draw from Mount Holly and Edgewater Park and Fort Dix. That meant the newspaper had to pull people from around the county to Willingboro as well as taking whatever ads came from stores in the established towns. In essence, the developer and the newspaper were creating a regional market where none had existed before.
The Burlington County Times is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, having been established in 1958 when the first families began moving into their Levitt houses in Willingboro.
On the one hand, the BCT had a blank slate -- it had no longtime readers to alienate with changes, as it had no readers at all. On the other hand, it was being made up and printed at the Bucks County plant until it was firmly enough established to have its own, so it had to conform to the basic makeup of that newspaper. And it had to conform to reader expectations of a newspaper so that people would not reject it in favor of the Philadelphia or Trenton papers, while recognizing that many people would take the larger papers anyway. Quite a challenge, and one that easily could have not been met. Yet the BCT sunk its roots and established itself as a paper for a county without a traditional center. It had to offer its readers what they wanted from the start. So what did it offer them?
By the fall of 1967, the nine-year-old BCT, which published Monday through Saturday afternoons, was running one or two pages of "women's news," two clear pages of editorials and news features -- the op-ed page was not filled with pundits but with in-depth wire stories as well as Dear Abby -- three or four pages (with ads) of sports, a couple of pages of comics and puzzles, and general news pages to fit the ads. A Monday might have eight to 10 news pages, a Wednesday or Thursday around 25. Page 3 was always open, but everything from there to the comics pages was clearly determined by how many ads there were. What was the news-to-ad ratio? No idea, but 60 percent news looked like a stretch. It was probably 50-50.
This was an afternoon paper, so the only way it got out the door in those days of Linotypes and stereotypers was for many of the pages to be made up the day before. Just a few pages would be reserved for breaking news, and the back pages had to consist of wire or local stories that would not change overnight. The front page would be made up late, so it would have to have a couple of "not really front page stories" available to fill it out when local copy ran short or didn't happen. But generally, as a local afternoon paper, only the most essential or interesting wire stories would get in. On one Thursday in mid-October, this meant there were nine stories on A1. Only two jumped.
This Thursday's paper -- in a typical week, no election ads, no pre-Christmas runup, just an ordinary paper -- had about 56 columns of general news (it was an eight-column page). Women's news added 10 columns and, perhaps most shocking by today's standards, Sports had 11 -- the equivalent of two pages today. This didn't take into account the comics and puzzles. There were four pages of classified, but again, the pages were wider.
Readers looking for advertising on this Thursday -- a Best Food Day, as we used to call it -- got ads for the major groceries. Sears took six pages, and Pomeroy's probably accounted for three although its ads were scattered. Other display advertisers included a carpet store, a paint store, an optometrist, a fabric store, discount stores, a beauty salon, a bank, a children's clothing shop and two tire stores -- the same odd collection of advertisers local newspapers have today. (If your memory goes back this far, the major movies playing were "Dr. Zhivago," "Up the Down Staircase," "The Sound of Music" and "A Man for All Seasons.")
But what news did the paper provide its readers as it continued to sink its roots into its county? Next post.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The Retail World of 1966
This is a post where I'm on territory I know little about, so be warned.
I looked at some newspapers from November 1966 to make sure that I wasn't being nostalgic about how much department store advertising there was. There really were 10 or more pages of Sunday advertising from each of the Big Four department stores in Philadelphia -- John Wanamaker, Strawbridge & Clothier, Gimbels and Lit Bros. With lesser amounts from Sears, Penneys, Bonwit Teller, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor and C.A. Rowell, Philadelphia's only big neighborhood department store.
But that made me wonder -- who else advertised at that time in newspapers? How has the retail and advertising environment so changed?
So I looked at three daily Inquirers for the first week in November and the Sunday Inquirer. At that time, the Bulletin would have gotten the majority of daily advertising, but the Inquirer was larger on Sunday. Advertisers considered the daily Inquirer no bargain. The department stores were represented, and there were "co-op" advertisers (like car ads with the names of local dealers at the bottom). There were five big grocery chains -- A&P, Acme, Penn Fruit, Food Fair and Pantry Pride. And, of course, every day had movie ads -- though not as large or as many as one might recall. But the paper was not stuffed with ads.
Missing today is that there was much more national advertising -- a lot (a LOT!) of beer and liquor advertising, and patent-medicine advertising (stomach pills, nasal sprays). There were cigarette ads, of course, and ads for Hills Bros. Coffee, Canada Dry, Mott's -- but mostly liquor ads, perhaps because back then liquor could not be advertised on television. These were newspaper clients that went back decades.
The other category less seen today is "contract ads" -- to get the contract rate, you had to run an ad at a certain frequency, usually least once a week, so you had an evergreen ad that ran every Tuesday and then would get a better rate on special ads. (The Kansas City Star was a huge contract-ad paper; every day's paper had scores of 1-column-by-1-inch ads to secure the contract rate.) There were a lot of "Dental Plate Repair" ads like this, along with some plumbers, rug cleaners and the like. The daily paper had surprisingly little "buy this today!" advertising, although it did attract men's stores.
Then came the "Thursday zones," as we used to call them -- once-a-week sections with zoned advertising. They were bursting with ads, but not just for local merchants. Woolworth's was there, as was Dodge Trucks. Some chains, such as Atlantic Appliance, only advertised in the zones. Clearly they wanted to be in the paper, but not at full rate.
And then came Sunday, when more than 100 additional advertisers came forward. Probably some of them were in the daily Bulletin. These included the major niche retailers: In men's wear, Jacob Reed's Sons, Morville, Berg Bros.; in women's, Lillian Albus, Helen Caro, Franklin Simon, The Blum Store and especially Nan Duskin; in shoes, Dial, Geuting's, Baker's. Fur stores were a big category back then. Jewelers were somewhat underrepresented, but it might just have been the week.
Major space was taken by the discounters, such as E.J. Korvette and S. Klein, and the era's big-box appliance stores, such as Silo and Dee's. And the J.B. Van Sciver furniture stores took a page and a half.
What amazed me was the number of ads that I would call singles or bloopers -- 2x6, 1x4, 3x5, one per week. I remembered the department store ads correctly, but had forgotten about all the small advertisers -- like Typhoon Fence and Gumas Bros. Toys. Most advertisers in The Inquirer were small advertisers. And they advertised full-run. Marv Blatt Tire, which is still at its location four blocks from where I work, ran a full-run ad on Sundays. That was one million circulation all over Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware for a tire store with one location. The Frances Rosen Dress Shop at 2455 N. 54th St. ran a full-run ad. Nowadays Frances would be told that no one more than three or four miles from her store would ever go there.
Advertising is one of the best-read things in newspapers. The fewer ads we have, the fewer reasons there are to read the paper. Back in those days, newspapers could demand pretty much whatever rate they wanted, but I'm sure most of The Inquirer's clients were just paying for the cost of the newsprint. I'm also sure it takes more time to serve those sort of clients than one makes off their business -- back then you could charge them for the composing room work, now you just paste in a pdf -- but would people pay more attention to papers if there simply were more ads, even if we just broke even on them? (Because whatever people want, it's always coupled with: More.)
Print can never compete with click-through ad rates, but if the per-unit cost of advertising is simply declining overall, would it be better to just take less money and get more volume? I don't know enough about the advertising business to know, and I know that there are rules about unfair competition that can get you in trouble if you sell ads at a loss. But since we let classified grow to become half of ad revenue to replace the national and retail clients we lost, and if classified advertising is now What Works Best Online, maybe the only thing left is to put a "sale!" sign on the price of retail advertising for small businesses. Seeing some of the ads in our local papers, like a daily two-page ad for an appliance store that's moving, I wonder if it's being done already.
The inevitable problem for metro dailies, I know, is that these days those small merchants are in strip malls or small towns miles from the city. Except for the Thursday zones, nearly all of the small advertisers back then were in the city of Philadelphia.
The department store technique was: If it doesn't sell, mark it down until it does. In today's world, once you've marked down prices, you have to keep them there. But people go to a Wal-mart or Target not just because it has low prices but because it has lots of merchandise. The cost of newsprint being what it is, one has to break even, but who are today's equivalents of Van Scivers or Nan Duskin -- the middle-level store that draws from the whole region, that's not Wal-Mart and not La-Di-Da Gifts? I know newspapers must be making calls on them. Or was it that the only way it was profitable to keep those accounts was the money provided by 10 pages of ads from Wanamakers and Gimbels? Whatever, a paper with just-break-even ads has to be better in the short run than the acres of adless pages in the Post and the Times or the six-page A sections in some metro papers.
So I looked in one of our local papers today. Ads for Dunkin' Donuts and C&C's Spirit of Fitness. Ads for dentists. Contract ads for furniture stores. Banks, shoe stores, diners, health clubs. National ads for cell phones and Dell computers. Spine doctors. Kitchen cabinet firms. And a 30-page Kohl's back-to-school preprint. The daily paper is the same business outside of classified that it was in 1966, the same odd collection of advertisers. In the Sunday paper, it's all inserts instead of ROP ads, but it's the same products being sold -- clothes, TVs, furniture. I don't know anything about the advertising business, but a paper that's just journalism, no matter how great, has to have less appeal.
I looked at some newspapers from November 1966 to make sure that I wasn't being nostalgic about how much department store advertising there was. There really were 10 or more pages of Sunday advertising from each of the Big Four department stores in Philadelphia -- John Wanamaker, Strawbridge & Clothier, Gimbels and Lit Bros. With lesser amounts from Sears, Penneys, Bonwit Teller, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lord & Taylor and C.A. Rowell, Philadelphia's only big neighborhood department store.
But that made me wonder -- who else advertised at that time in newspapers? How has the retail and advertising environment so changed?
So I looked at three daily Inquirers for the first week in November and the Sunday Inquirer. At that time, the Bulletin would have gotten the majority of daily advertising, but the Inquirer was larger on Sunday. Advertisers considered the daily Inquirer no bargain. The department stores were represented, and there were "co-op" advertisers (like car ads with the names of local dealers at the bottom). There were five big grocery chains -- A&P, Acme, Penn Fruit, Food Fair and Pantry Pride. And, of course, every day had movie ads -- though not as large or as many as one might recall. But the paper was not stuffed with ads.
Missing today is that there was much more national advertising -- a lot (a LOT!) of beer and liquor advertising, and patent-medicine advertising (stomach pills, nasal sprays). There were cigarette ads, of course, and ads for Hills Bros. Coffee, Canada Dry, Mott's -- but mostly liquor ads, perhaps because back then liquor could not be advertised on television. These were newspaper clients that went back decades.
The other category less seen today is "contract ads" -- to get the contract rate, you had to run an ad at a certain frequency, usually least once a week, so you had an evergreen ad that ran every Tuesday and then would get a better rate on special ads. (The Kansas City Star was a huge contract-ad paper; every day's paper had scores of 1-column-by-1-inch ads to secure the contract rate.) There were a lot of "Dental Plate Repair" ads like this, along with some plumbers, rug cleaners and the like. The daily paper had surprisingly little "buy this today!" advertising, although it did attract men's stores.
Then came the "Thursday zones," as we used to call them -- once-a-week sections with zoned advertising. They were bursting with ads, but not just for local merchants. Woolworth's was there, as was Dodge Trucks. Some chains, such as Atlantic Appliance, only advertised in the zones. Clearly they wanted to be in the paper, but not at full rate.
And then came Sunday, when more than 100 additional advertisers came forward. Probably some of them were in the daily Bulletin. These included the major niche retailers: In men's wear, Jacob Reed's Sons, Morville, Berg Bros.; in women's, Lillian Albus, Helen Caro, Franklin Simon, The Blum Store and especially Nan Duskin; in shoes, Dial, Geuting's, Baker's. Fur stores were a big category back then. Jewelers were somewhat underrepresented, but it might just have been the week.
Major space was taken by the discounters, such as E.J. Korvette and S. Klein, and the era's big-box appliance stores, such as Silo and Dee's. And the J.B. Van Sciver furniture stores took a page and a half.
What amazed me was the number of ads that I would call singles or bloopers -- 2x6, 1x4, 3x5, one per week. I remembered the department store ads correctly, but had forgotten about all the small advertisers -- like Typhoon Fence and Gumas Bros. Toys. Most advertisers in The Inquirer were small advertisers. And they advertised full-run. Marv Blatt Tire, which is still at its location four blocks from where I work, ran a full-run ad on Sundays. That was one million circulation all over Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware for a tire store with one location. The Frances Rosen Dress Shop at 2455 N. 54th St. ran a full-run ad. Nowadays Frances would be told that no one more than three or four miles from her store would ever go there.
Advertising is one of the best-read things in newspapers. The fewer ads we have, the fewer reasons there are to read the paper. Back in those days, newspapers could demand pretty much whatever rate they wanted, but I'm sure most of The Inquirer's clients were just paying for the cost of the newsprint. I'm also sure it takes more time to serve those sort of clients than one makes off their business -- back then you could charge them for the composing room work, now you just paste in a pdf -- but would people pay more attention to papers if there simply were more ads, even if we just broke even on them? (Because whatever people want, it's always coupled with: More.)
Print can never compete with click-through ad rates, but if the per-unit cost of advertising is simply declining overall, would it be better to just take less money and get more volume? I don't know enough about the advertising business to know, and I know that there are rules about unfair competition that can get you in trouble if you sell ads at a loss. But since we let classified grow to become half of ad revenue to replace the national and retail clients we lost, and if classified advertising is now What Works Best Online, maybe the only thing left is to put a "sale!" sign on the price of retail advertising for small businesses. Seeing some of the ads in our local papers, like a daily two-page ad for an appliance store that's moving, I wonder if it's being done already.
The inevitable problem for metro dailies, I know, is that these days those small merchants are in strip malls or small towns miles from the city. Except for the Thursday zones, nearly all of the small advertisers back then were in the city of Philadelphia.
The department store technique was: If it doesn't sell, mark it down until it does. In today's world, once you've marked down prices, you have to keep them there. But people go to a Wal-mart or Target not just because it has low prices but because it has lots of merchandise. The cost of newsprint being what it is, one has to break even, but who are today's equivalents of Van Scivers or Nan Duskin -- the middle-level store that draws from the whole region, that's not Wal-Mart and not La-Di-Da Gifts? I know newspapers must be making calls on them. Or was it that the only way it was profitable to keep those accounts was the money provided by 10 pages of ads from Wanamakers and Gimbels? Whatever, a paper with just-break-even ads has to be better in the short run than the acres of adless pages in the Post and the Times or the six-page A sections in some metro papers.
So I looked in one of our local papers today. Ads for Dunkin' Donuts and C&C's Spirit of Fitness. Ads for dentists. Contract ads for furniture stores. Banks, shoe stores, diners, health clubs. National ads for cell phones and Dell computers. Spine doctors. Kitchen cabinet firms. And a 30-page Kohl's back-to-school preprint. The daily paper is the same business outside of classified that it was in 1966, the same odd collection of advertisers. In the Sunday paper, it's all inserts instead of ROP ads, but it's the same products being sold -- clothes, TVs, furniture. I don't know anything about the advertising business, but a paper that's just journalism, no matter how great, has to have less appeal.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Only In the Newspaper Business
The Daily Mirror in London is redesigning. The Daily Mirror says it is doing this because of competitive pressure. Cool.
The Daily Mirror in 2008 is responding to competitive pressure it first noticed in 1969. Not cool.
Associate editor Matt Kelly says: “In 1903, the Mirror invented the concept of popular journalism – at one stage it sold seven million copies in one day. It didn’t do that without being innovative and brilliant. But it lost its way 40 years ago when Rupert Murdoch took a newspaper we owned called The Sun and relaunched it as a tabloid. He stole our clothes. And that was the start of an identity crisis that we are only now beginning to shake off.”
Yes, that's right. Change, four decades in the making. Oh, the newsroom committees! "Now into its second decade of imagining the Mirror of the late 20th century, the long-range planning group..."
And one can just imagine the jubilation in, say, the Pleasant Passings Country Home in Upper Lower Algernon, Hamps., where, say, longtime Sun reader Archie Swinburn, 105, says: "In 1969 the Sun came out with a better product and I switched from the Mirror. But I knew eventually the Mirror would come through and win me back. I'm proud to say I'm a Mirror reader again. Good old Mirror."
Earlier, I missed this post by a guest contributor to Newsosaur, and you may have too. As Tim McGuire noted, while everything is a problem at the moment this is an advertising problem more than a readership problem. Print readership is declining, but decline can be managed; classified revenue simply jumped off the top of the building to its demise below, which is not a manageable problem. Yet newspaper ad departments often seem to be waiting by the phone for the ad manager of Kistler-Collister or Sanger-Harris or Sterling-Lindner to be calling to say they'll again buy 10 5x18s in the Sunday C section. (A tip of the Hatlo Hat to anyone who can name the three cities where those department stores operated without checking Wikipedia.)
There's really not much we in newsrooms can do about this, but publishers can. At least one new owner of a major newspaper quickly identified that the major problem facing him when he walked in the building, was the advertising department, and took action. At this point, though, even more radical action is needed -- probably creating new products, whether print or online, that will benefit the company as a whole even if they simply let the basic news product become a sort of brand-signifier for the whole operation even if it operates essentially in the red. (A local-local weekly associated with but not produced by the staff of Big Newspaper still has more credibility and clout in the market than a weekly produced by someone else.) Yes, that means Big Daily Newspaper becomes a loss leader in a company with a lot of other higher-profit publications and products. But Big Daily Newspaper provides the goodwill that makes the other products more effective.
The Daily Mirror in 2008 is responding to competitive pressure it first noticed in 1969. Not cool.
Associate editor Matt Kelly says: “In 1903, the Mirror invented the concept of popular journalism – at one stage it sold seven million copies in one day. It didn’t do that without being innovative and brilliant. But it lost its way 40 years ago when Rupert Murdoch took a newspaper we owned called The Sun and relaunched it as a tabloid. He stole our clothes. And that was the start of an identity crisis that we are only now beginning to shake off.”
Yes, that's right. Change, four decades in the making. Oh, the newsroom committees! "Now into its second decade of imagining the Mirror of the late 20th century, the long-range planning group..."
And one can just imagine the jubilation in, say, the Pleasant Passings Country Home in Upper Lower Algernon, Hamps., where, say, longtime Sun reader Archie Swinburn, 105, says: "In 1969 the Sun came out with a better product and I switched from the Mirror. But I knew eventually the Mirror would come through and win me back. I'm proud to say I'm a Mirror reader again. Good old Mirror."
Earlier, I missed this post by a guest contributor to Newsosaur, and you may have too. As Tim McGuire noted, while everything is a problem at the moment this is an advertising problem more than a readership problem. Print readership is declining, but decline can be managed; classified revenue simply jumped off the top of the building to its demise below, which is not a manageable problem. Yet newspaper ad departments often seem to be waiting by the phone for the ad manager of Kistler-Collister or Sanger-Harris or Sterling-Lindner to be calling to say they'll again buy 10 5x18s in the Sunday C section. (A tip of the Hatlo Hat to anyone who can name the three cities where those department stores operated without checking Wikipedia.)
There's really not much we in newsrooms can do about this, but publishers can. At least one new owner of a major newspaper quickly identified that the major problem facing him when he walked in the building, was the advertising department, and took action. At this point, though, even more radical action is needed -- probably creating new products, whether print or online, that will benefit the company as a whole even if they simply let the basic news product become a sort of brand-signifier for the whole operation even if it operates essentially in the red. (A local-local weekly associated with but not produced by the staff of Big Newspaper still has more credibility and clout in the market than a weekly produced by someone else.) Yes, that means Big Daily Newspaper becomes a loss leader in a company with a lot of other higher-profit publications and products. But Big Daily Newspaper provides the goodwill that makes the other products more effective.
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