Aug 04, 2005
Posted by Mike in Media,Newspapers
0 Comments
Trade you 2 Free Presses for a Tom Seaver Rookie Card
If the title didn’t tip you off, it’s been well over 30 years or so since I spent recess flipping baseball cards (for keepsies), but an article in today’s New York Times has all of the intricate rules and subtleties running through my mind again.
2 Huge Publishing Chains Swap Newspapers details the high-level flipping session between Gannett, Knight-Ridder, and MediaNews Group of newspapers in Detroit, Washington, and Florida. Basically, Knight-Ridder gave tradesies of the Detroit Free-Press to Gannett if Gannett would give tradesies to MediaNews of three Pete Rose cards and a couple of newspapers in Washington… ahhh read the article.
Can’t keep up with who owns what paper? Columbia Journalism Review’s Who Owns What apparently can.
So basically the big media companies are now just trading companies amongst themselves, in what I suppose is an effort to consolidate properties and bolster ad revenues. John Morton, a media anaylst quoted in the Times piece summed it up pretty well:
“He found that cause for lament. “This is further evidence,” he said, “of how financially driven these companies are. The era of when newspaper companies had an emotional attachment to their properties has really withered away.”
You and I see that as the steady rise in newspaper advertising rates, as circulation number steadily decline. According to The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media 2005, the total weekday circulation of daily newspapers in the US has been in steady decline since 1990. From 62.3 million in 1990 to 55.2 million in 2003, that’s down 11%+. (Here’s the chart) So what’s happened to daily newspaper rates? If you own (and advertise) a business you know.
Don’t get me wrong, I still recommend newspaper advertising to clients who will benefit from it, but between the decline in circulation, and myriad other news sources out there, it’s getting harder and harder to justify a $5,000.00, single-run space ad in a daily newspaper, when that same money could produce (and air, for a short run) a targeted cable commercial, or could design and place a decent online campaign, or could design, print, and mail a targeted direct mail piece, or…
Mike's Google+ Profile
