Front page ads coming to LA Times(Cash flow tanks/Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)

LA Observed ^ | July 13, 2007 | Kevin Roderick

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Friday Evening Good News!

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ping

[hunter112]

Newspaper, magazine, and most Internet ads: avoidable. Radio and TV ads: much less avoidable. Let the papers put them wherever they want, I’ll just skip over them, and the cats don’t mind them in the litter box!

[Cowboy Bob]

Why not have “Personal Ads” on the front page. Maybe Mayor Villarigosa will take one out.

[Anti-Bubba182]

"Revenue was down 10% in the second quarter, and cash flow down a whopping 27%, making it one of the worst quarters ever experienced."

Could not happen to a nicer bunch!!

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Publisher David Hiller just dropped a "mid-year business update" on L.A. Times staffers that has fresh bad news: "Revenue was down 10% in the second quarter, and cash flow down a whopping 27%, making it one of the worst quarters ever experienced." Emphasis added

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The new front page ad for the LA Times

[IronJack]

The local paper started putting ads in the Sunday Comics! It was a strip that overlapped the main page -- clumsy, annoying, and stupid. Everybody I talked to absolutely hated it. I called the paper and told them that they were really pissing off a lot of readers. The guy practically laughed at me and told me -- in so many words -- that that was tough, that the paper made so much money off those ads that there was no way they'd let something trivial like reader disatisfaction persuade them to discontinue the practice.

I discontinued my subscription a week later. Apparently so did a lot of others because within a month, the paper was calling me back begging me to renew. I also saw that their readership was down almost 10 percent from year-ago.

And this is a fairly conservative newspaper in Nebraska. Imagine the conceit of the "established" media flagships.

[ChadGore]

Has anyone told the LAT to try printing the truth?

[Gritty]

[Calvin Locke]

Yeah, the local Gannett rag got a new editor, and he tried install big ads on the two page opinion section.

The moon bats had a fit that their same-old same-old ad nauseum letters weren't getting printed as much.

The paper flinched.

[Uncledave]

We will make sure the revenue is additive, and not just switched from other pages

Yah, right.

[bert]

my comment to David is to liquidate the paper. Waiting for death is costly. Liquidate now and save a bunch of bucks from certain loss.

[Anti-Bubba182]

Lol! It might come to that! The LA Times is one of the worst in the country. It is good they are hurting.

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my comment to David is to liquidate the paper. Waiting for death is costly. Liquidate now and save a bunch of bucks from certain loss.

Nah, lets let them bleed down a bit more...

[Uncledave]

research shows ROP ads are actually one of the big reasons readers buy and look at the paper (unlike most media)

BS, if that were true advertisers wouldn't be leaving. A small segment of (mostly older) readers want the supermarket inserts, and that's it as far as readership demand for ads goes.

[bilhosty]

I heard that the Tribune company was bought by Sam Zell sometime ago. He is supposedly a Zionist and a Republican. Has anybody heard of any positive changes going on? I know but you always hope, can’t you?

[janereinheimer]

Has anyone else told the LA Times the other bad news — that they’re losing readers because they don’t report the news, but rather, their stories are politically biased?

The media warlords are all going to suffer financial reversals unless they move toward the center and get away from pandering to the political left, which doesn’t have readers anyway.

Haven’t any of them figured out yet that the conservatives in this country are the ones who read?

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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-times14jul14,1,1572803.story?coll=la-headlines-business

From the Los Angeles Times
Times publisher says front page may get ads
By Thomas S. Mulligan
Times Staff Writer

July 14, 2007

Amid a steep decline in revenue, the Los Angeles Times is planning to break with long-standing tradition by selling ads on its front page, Publisher David Hiller said Friday.

When it happens, the newspaper will be the largest metropolitan paper in the country to place ads there.

Hiller said the decision was his. The Times’ corporate parent, Chicago-based Tribune Co., plans to sell Page One ads at its 10 other newspapers as well, said Doug Thomas, a senior vice president for advertising in Tribune’s publishing division. He said Tribune’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale began selling front-page ads this year and got “an incredible response” from advertisers.

Hiller said the initiative “is a meaningful response to the demand for more innovative solutions from advertisers who have a lot of choices about where to spend their money.”

“We aren’t the only game in town anymore,” he said in an interview Friday.

Earlier in the day, Hiller outlined the changes in a two-page memo to Times employees. He said premium-priced ads would raise “several million dollars in revenue” at a time when the newspaper’s financial performance has been extraordinarily weak. In the second quarter, The Times’ overall revenue slid 10% and cash flow plunged 27%, “making it one of the worst quarters ever experienced,” he said. Year to date, ad revenue is down 8%.

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