Newspapers start $75 million campaign to fight image of decline (Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)

Las Vegas SUN ^ | January 31, 2007 | RYAN NAKASHIMA

[Milhous]

LAS VEGAS (AP) - The newspaper industry this week announced a $75 million marketing campaign to declare its relevance in the Internet age as advertising revenues were flat, buffeted by major mergers and a wounded domestic auto industry.

It's the second year in a row that the Newspaper Association of America has advertised directly to its advertisers, trying to change the perception that the industry is on the decline, executives said.

"I am sick and tired of all the doom and gloom reports out there about the death of this industry," said Earl Cox, chief strategic officer of The Martin Agency, the marketing group in charge of the campaign. The perception is "inaccurate and it's unfair and it's unacceptable."

Ad revenue at its member papers in the third quarter of last year declined 1.5 percent from a year earlier to $11.79 billion, according to the NAA. Traditional print ads fell 2.6 percent to about $11.2 billion while online ads rose 23 percent to $638 million. Total ad revenues were slightly up for the first two quarters of the year.

The campaign attempts to attack the notion that newspapers are being left behind in the battle to attract consumer "eyeballs."

One campaign slogan reads: "The Internet is the best thing to happen to newspapers since the paper boy."

A central figure is a cartoon character seen reading a newspaper online while carrying a cellular phone tower and typing on two keyboards.

"This is about audience and audience is a multimedia term," said John Kimball, the association's chief marketing officer. "Newspapers have multiple channels into the marketplace that we didn't used to have and that's what we're talking about. That audience is not shrinking. That audience is growing."

While print copy circulation has been on the decline for a quarter century, Web page hits by unique visitors is growing, he said. More than 58 million unique visitors checked out online newspaper Web sites in September 2006, more than read Yahoo! News and MSNBC.com combined, he said. That's up 22 percent from the previous year.

But a core issue for papers is how those readers are counted. While many advertisers factor Web traffic into ad rates, physical circulation "is still the coin of the realm," said Neal Lulofs, spokesman for the Audit Bureau of Circulation, which checks newspaper claims of circulation and audience.

Last year, the ABC introduced a "consolidated media report" for papers that want third party proof of circulation and Web traffic presented in a "total contacts" figure.

Advertisers are also paying more attention to the demographics of a publication's audience, which can be more readily tracked online, he said.

Only about 50 newspapers have their Web traffic audited by the ABC, including The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and Toronto Star, he said.

"The trend is not circulation or readership or circulation or audience, it's circulation and," Lulofs said.

The announcement of the campaign, to launch April 2, came as The New York Times Co. announced Wednesday a large writedown on two papers it acquired, The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, giving it a net loss of $648 million for the three-month period ended in December. Revenue rose 4.3 percent to $931.5 million, ahead of analysts' estimates.

The trouble at the two subsidiaries reflects a problem for the newspaper business as a whole, said analyst Edward Atorino with The Benchmark Company. Major telecom and retail company mergers, along with a struggling auto and real estate sector, have caused ad spending overall to stagnate.

"Their efforts have been blunted, thwarted by circumstances beyond their control," Atorino said. "There's been a dramatic shift in advertising spending across a range of categories that has affected advertising growth overall. It just disappeared."

Some seminars at the NAA's annual marketing conference in Las Vegas, which ran from Sunday to Wednesday, urged some 2,000 member newspapers in the U.S. and Canada to make use of their online presence to boost subscriptions and provide more value to advertisers.

Scott Stines, president of mass2one, said his company's permission-based e-mail marketing program has helped newspapers retain customers and extract a few more advertising dollars from ad clients.

"There's no home runs, there's no grand slams in any media channel," he said. "It's about singles and bunts and bases on balls. It's about every little incremental thing."

[Milhous]

February 03, 2007
Throwing Good Money After Bad

The newspaper industry's trade group, the Newspaper Association of America is at it again, announcing that it's going to spend $75 million for a fresh promotional campaign to convince people to read newspapers.

The good news is that they've dropped the inane and much-derided Monty Python-like Victorian imagery of last year's big newspaper promotional campaign, which only served to remind people of how mired in the past the industry had become. This year's campaign will be focus on "newspapers of the future" (if there is a future!). The bad news is that one of the slogans being used is almost as anachronistic as last year's campaign: "The Internet is the best thing to happen to newspapers since the paper boy." Um, what's a paper boy?

Presumably, this campaign will be roughly as visible as last years, which seemed to appear only in newspapers and in posters hung in newspaper lobbies—not exactly the best places to go trawling for new readers. What do you suppose the amount spent per new customer will be on a $75 million budget? It's got to be astronomical.

The newspaper industry would be much better served by spending the money on some true innovation. Seventy-five million dollars will buy a lot of investment in R&D, new Web innovations, smart hiring and other initiatives that will reach and acquire new customers in ways that this ridiculous ad campaign will not. That mythical paper boy of the ad campaign doesn't toss papers off his (or her--hello?) bike anymore. That kid is listening to an iPod, text-messaging friends and playing video games. The newspaper industry needs to find ways to reach out to that audience with relevant new products, not irrelevant, self-indulgent ad campaigns.

---

Doth protest too much

The newspaper industry is spending $75 million to argue that it’s not screwed. How much better it would be to spend $75 million on innovation so, indeed, it won’t be screwed.

[Milhous]

ping

[Lancey Howard]

[JennysCool]

"I am sick and tired of all the doom and gloom reports out there about the death of this industry," said Earl Cox

Hillary must be his speech coach.

[Bernard]

Presumably, this campaign will be roughly as visible as last years, which seemed to appear only in newspapers and in posters hung in newspaper lobbies

So, the newspapers are going to spend it on each other - what a great way to increase advertising revenue for the industry., and appear to reduce the slide in advertising revenues.

[GladesGuru]

"The paper girl" - another figment of the fevered Liberal mind, aided by (naturally) revisionist historians.

TLiberal mind - it's an ugly thing.

[AZLiberty]

$75 million -- Wasn't that the net worth of the Dinosaur Media, before they blew it on an ad campaign?

[DakotaRed]

Funny they will fight the "appearance" of the decline, instead of the actual decline.

Typical lefty liberals, haven't a clue.

[mowowie]

At first I thought that I would miss sitting at the bar reading my newspaper but then I realized that will never happen, instead, in the future i'll just be reading a paper with actual news in it.

[jwparkerjr]

re: "I am sick and tired of all the doom and gloom reports out there about the death of this industry."

Or as one guy put it almost a hundred years ago, ""I am sick and tired of all the doom and gloom reports out there about icebergs."

Know your history and learn from it, or be prepared to live it again.

[neverhillorat]

Spend the money in a media that is dead to find new readers? OK
The old saying, pigs get turned into bacon, was never more true when gleefully we watch Major Newspapers slowly die. Major TV is close behind. Why? First, they are losing news hounds to talk radio and the Internet. They don`t report the news, they try to make it. Once smart readers figured that out, see you later. (I used to get the Oregonian, WSJ, and the Sunday LATIMES and Dallas Morning News. Now I get no paper. Bet I`m not alone)
Second, cause we are gone,the ads in Newspapers aren`t don`t work. Advertisers cut back and tried different ways to get customers. Newspapers, arrogant as they are, responded to the loss of ad dollars by, you guessed it, raising rates! Bottom line, don`t buy stock in the NYT.

[GSlob]

It is not the image of decline, it is decline of the image.

[advance_copy]

If the idiots would drop their leftist agenda and start reporting news, people would subscribe and they would make money. Instead, they produce socialist agitprop and wonder why people don't buy it.

[quantim]

The newspaper industry this week announced a $75 million marketing campaign to declare its relevance in the Internet age as advertising revenues were flat, buffeted by major mergers and a wounded domestic auto industry.

Not sure if I've ever read a dumber sentence, but it's from a cluck..

What part of 'self-inflicted' is difficult?

Gannett recently bought my local very dinky paper and they are clueless why businesses like mine no longer advertise with them.

[Bernard]

I read several local papers on-line, but it gets harder as they attach more animation ads to each page. And, most of them force registration, which means I have to sacrifice an email address to the spam emailers they sell the addresses to.

The next generation will be newspaper-type websites that start from scratch, but what is holding this up is that the age group that would the most likely source (mid-20's) is not politically or community aware yet, so they don't feel the need to replace newspapers. That will probably happen in the next 10 years.

[MinorityRepublican]

Simple just create a free email address that you can sacrifice to spam.

[Bonaparte]

"The trend is not circulation or readership or circulation or audience, it's circulation and," Lulofs said.

And this is the spokesman for the ABC? Sounds more like Professor Irwin Corey.

[sine_nomine]

Be sure to read the full-page ads in your local...Oh, you don't get them anymore?

Be sure to read about it on Free Republic.

[kjo]

As long as ninety percent of the newspaper business reports news in a liberal biased manner this decline will continue.

[ShawTaylor]

Where is the mention of the real cause of the irreversible decline of the evil media: Their liberal bias, rabid anti-Americanism, their support for terrorists and every America-hating vermin on the planet, their arrogance, their lies, and their stupidity.
The malaise they are suffering from is not going to be cured by no $75 million campaign. The liberal media going to keep sinking in perpetuity, and a very good thing for America too.

And it's not just the newspaper business either, it's the entire liberal media and all it's ramifications, especially network news:

"Over the past 20 years, with the decline of the mainstream media and the rise of internet use and talk radio, the American people have gained many opportunities to get at the truth. No longer are Cronkite’s lies about the Tet offensive the only report we hear. No longer can Dan Rather use forged documents to smear an American president and go unchallenged, nor, without correction, can the New York Times, Reuters and the Associated Press publish doctored photographs and articles about Iraqi mass atrocities that never happened.
-----snip----
“The evening network news programs continued their steady but bumpy decline.
Between November 2004 and November 2005, ratings for the nightly news fell 6% and share fell 3%. That is an acceleration of the pace of decline in recent years. It translates into overall viewership on the three commercial nightly newscasts of 27 million viewers, or a decline of some 1.8 million viewers from November 2004. From the start of CNN in 1980, nightly news viewership for the Big Three networks has fallen by some 25 million, or 48%.

As measured in ratings, the percentage of nightly news viewing in all TV households, the three network evening newscasts had a combined 18.9 in November 2005, down from 20.2 a year earlier.

As measured in share, the percentage of just those television sets that are on at the time, the three newscasts earned a 37 share in November 2005, a drop from the 38 earned in November 2004.

In the previous editions of this report, we have illustrated the decline in viewership for the nightly network newscasts by using two landmarks: 1969, the historic peak of nightly news viewership, and 1980, the launch of the cable news network CNN. In 1969, the three commercial nightly network newscasts had a combined 50 rating and an 85 share. In 1980, they had a 37 rating and a 75 share. Based on November data for 2005, ratings have fallen 62% since 1969 and 48% since 1980. Share has fallen 56% since 1969 and 51% since 1980.”"

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