More fun in Tampa

The newsroom doesn't "need help" -- it already gets help, from citizen journalism!

What they're trying to invent in Tampa, apparently, is citizen ad sales and citizen circulation sales. Don't get huffy just because the first citizens asked are the ones in the newsroom.

Some day, the man on the street will have a shot in that ticket lottery, too, if he does some ad or circulation worker's job for him!

 

It's not that it's hard to sell it, it's that the powers-that-be don't give a crap because they believe that they need to gear all ads to well-to-do women that make all the buying decisions.

And presumably they would never, ever read the sports section.

 

selling into sporsts sections is difficult, enough so that ad reps don't waste their time doing it. Most are on commission and see no value in putting in hours for a sale likely not to go through
they continually mine the same accounts, rather than chasing new business

 

As much as the extra work would suck, if our higher-ups said they need help selling ads and that we would receive commission in some form, there's something about having my fate in my own hands (rather than the hands of someone downstairs who doesn't know what I work on every day) that appeals to me.

 

Word for word. Sell and ad, and you get in a fucking lottery?

 

They figure if we're stupid enough to go into this profession in the first place, then we're stupid enough to bite on a moronic offer like this.

 

Anyone that thinks that selling ads is easy, even forgetting the market we're in now, should do it for just one day.

 

Depends on the paper, I guess. St. Pete is finding time to print robust special sections on the World Series... haven't seen how many ads they're selling, but it must be good enough.

Like an earlier poster said, Tampa used to be such a good site and paper to visit. Now with the layoffs and the inane ideas going through this place, St. Pete gets better by the day.

 

The guy constantly looking for "bootstrappers" is overjoyed his industry model is catching on in a large market.

 

And any idiot EE or ME who thinks working in sports is easy should do it for just one day.

 

Still my favorite story about advertising departments. A fellow writer at my last paper asked a successful business owner in town why he bought an ad in the free weekly that gets tossed in the yard but didn't advertise in our daily G***e*t paper.

Business owner's reply?

"They asked."