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Newspaper industry

Newspaper associate to spend $75 million to fight decline perception

1 minute 5 comments

I haven’t talked about the newspaper industry in a while. The last time I posted on this topic was a gloom and doom article stating that the newspaper (print, mind you) will be dead within 10 years. The Las Vegas Sun has a story today that the Newspaper Association of America will spend $75 million to fight that perception among advertisers. The ad campaign launches April 2nd.

At issue is how readership is measured. The measurement that matters for most advertisers wanting to buy ad space in the print paper is circulation rates – which have been in decline for over two decades. But the newspaper association wants to change how readership is counted as their online presence is growing rapidly.

While I think this is a good move for the newspaper industry, I don’t see it affecting the cartoonist at all.

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Comments 5

  1. Good for them. I wish them good fortune.

  2. I do agree with Charles on this, but I’m also a bit weary. How many years’ salary could they pay for actual journalists and cartoonists with $75 million? Why not use that money to better their content, rather than the people’s perception of it?

  3. I have to agree with Josh. It seems like they are trying to impress adverstisers rather than an audience or potential audience. They want a different system to rate their readership to keep rates up and to inflate their outreach. The best way to boost sales is to find their niches and exploit them, similar to what talk radio did for AM.

    I don’t think this campaign will make them pork – the other white meat, or beef – it’s what’s for dinner or Got Milk (other associations that have succeeded with advertising)! I do wish them luck, but it seems like money wasted.

    However, we could have fun assisting them with campaign ideas … Newspapers – better than ever for wrapping fish … the better way to start fires … house trains more dogs than any other media …

  4. We could add more comics, too.

    Wiley Miller made an interesting post at toontalk.org

    Basically, he argued that the reason the comics page are so small lately is because newspaper editors are actually jealous at comics because nobody cares about actual news stories, but rather on comics.

    So the newspaper sales COULD be better if they focused on adding more comics.

  5. That makes perfect sense, really. I know I’d pick up a lot more papers if there were 4-8 pages of comics. (even if it had the content of 3-4 pages and they printed them bigger)

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