Ads on the front page

... is something I can live with.

 

You stick an ad on the front if you have to for a chunk of ad revenue. In this day and age for print, just be thankful you have such an ad buy.

Anyone still griping about how this infringes on editorial integrity, blah blah blah, needs a reality check. This is not some bean-counting "evil-doer" trying to mess with sports sections.

Go visit your finance and ad folks and ask them to explain what is really going on in today's print world.

 

Remember the good old days when newspapers didn't sell any on Page 3A because it was sacred?
Now, they don't sell any on 3A because the ad departments can't sell it...

 

Gannet's finest.

 

The Red Wing coverage was in a wrap-around or special section (can't remember which). The Wings had just clinched the conference the night before.

And that ad on the Freep sports isn't an everyday occurence. I think it was there mainly because of the conference clinching game.

 

That Dunham's ad is just plain awful. Worse than the Belle Tire ad they run from time to time.

 

When I was there, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal ran a 6x8 (swear to God it was this big) Pollard Friendly Ford ad on the sports front four days a week. It made us look like a weekly shopper in part because the colors were just ridiculously garish and the pressmen never could get the mix just right.

Once I bitched about the ad and the compositor looked at me like I had just blasphemed against the Lord (this was Texas, after all) and said, "That ad was here when you got here and it'll be here after you're gone. That ad pays your salary." Doesn't change the fact that it looks like shit and makes us look bush-league.

 

Worked at a place that ran a penis-enlargement ad regularly (not on the cover, but all the way across the bottom of an inside page). Publisher said it brought in $400K per year. What we need are a lot more dick ads.

 

What would be your breaking point on an ad on the sports front where you would raise all manner of hell, whether it did any good?

6x5? 6x10? A quarter page like that Freep abomination? Something gaudy near the banner?

 

Ding, ding, ding.

I know this isn't the idea everywhere, but at some of my shops, we've had some of the laziest ad people EVAR.

 

At our JRC joint, a daily of some size, they stick ads ALL OVER the section front. On the bottom of the page, as ears at the top, and floating halfway down the page. All over the fucking place. (They do it on Page 1A, too.)

We know, of course, there's nothing anybody in editorial can really do, but just for the hell of it, we were wondering what kind of super price we were getting for these ads stuck right in the middle of the page, so the ME asked the ad manager.

The answer? Nothing.

The ads on the section front aren't getting any additional premium at all. They were being sold for the same price as ads on Page 3, 5, 7 or 13.

See, advertisers don't just demand an ad right in the middle of a section front. That's something the jim-dandy ad salespersons have to offer to them. So they offer it to them, for the same chicken scratch they'd be paying to be on Page 9.

(Which, of course, degrades the relative value of the ads, and also degrades the product for the reader -- making the paper even LESS credible and salesworthy than it was before. Which of course is Priority Item No. 293 quntizillion for any JRC paper.)

Thanks a fucking lot. Although it's not like any of us really expected anything different.

Of course, the company brass is "stunned" and "perplexed" at its constant drop in ad revenues. Maybe because you're giving them away for fucking nothing, you think???