Kentucky basketball game tonight; flame away on me

And here I thought you meant that it was all a dying industry.

 

HBO Comedy is showing "Breakfast at Tiffany's" right now. George Peppard just walked upstairs to Holly's apartment, where outside the door on the floor is a bottle of milk sitting atop a folded newspaper.

I can imagine someone having to explain that to his or her children or grandchildren some day while watching this movie.

 

Newspapers, especially in towns like Lexington, already do pretty well on display ads. There isn't many other places to advertise that reach a wide audience in those small-to-medium towns. But that isn't enough. As many have said, the real hurt has come from the lack of classifieds. Before the Internet, we charged $50 an inch for a help wanted ad - just because we could. No we charge $7 for far fewer ads. And our classifieds are a fraction of what they once were.

And increasing local circulation isn't going to make a huge difference in ad revenue. Places like Lexington already have the overwhelming majority of local advertising, so telling them "We have more local eyes" won't make much difference to local businesses. They already understand the newspaper is the best way to reach local people, so they're already buying ads.

You have to find new revenue streams to make up for the gap in lost classifieds. One potential avenue is the Internet. So instead of reaching just UK fans in Lexington, you can tell Internet advertisers they're reaching the fans outside the market who read about UK during the week and then come into town for games. Those fans then eat, stay and shop and spend money at businesses they saw on the Herald-Leader Web site. That's an untapped market. Like has been said here, that's heavily dependent on ad staffs to understand that.

But that doesn't mean all resources should be shifted to the Web. Even if we sold all our "green space" or ad spots on the Web and cut our print product today, we'd go bankrupt tomorrow. Even if the paper I'm at cut all the paper costs, the Internet revenue would be a drop in the bucket and we'd all be out of a job, which may happen anyway, unfortunately. So going straight to Web won't work, and going straight to print would just extend the decline.

Plus, this theory of cutting the Web entirely to force people to read the paper severely underestimates people's ability to do things purely out of spite. I know a huge chunk of people would simply go without the news just because they are pissed the newspaper cut out the Web site. We hear all the time, "I'm canceling my subscription because of ..." In this case, people wouldn't even buy the paper because they don't want to give money to a company they were mad at.

 

Pundits talk about how Craigslist ruined classified advertising revenue. I'll agree with that, but does anyone think people will ditch Craiglist because the lack of quality control hurts.

There are too many fake ads on Craigslist and I won't search for anything on there anymore. I think other people are getting sick of the crap ads as well.

 

It's 11 pm, the UK game just ended, but I think I'll wait until 7 a.m. to read about what happened during the game.

 

That Cats didn't cover, if that's what you're worried about, Hackster.

 

It's good for tickets.

Facebook now has a marketplace on it. I'm sure it's free.

 

Betting on amateur sports is wrong.









And so is I.

 

Yeah, coupla real amateurs there, Hack.

 

I don't know about that. Using my Herald-Leader example, if Tipton and the columnist wanted to do their own website, recognizing the fact they could kick the shit out of the kids hired for 10 bucks an hour to replace them, they could get 4 car dealers to sponsor their website. Voila. 100,000 dollars a year apiece.

 

What does UK-UNC have to do with amateur sports?

 

Thought the internet didn't sell ads?