Juan Antonio Giner rightfully ridicules the journalistic lead weights who are moaning about the Wall Street Journal taking an ad on its front page. They have to pay the bills somehow. How do they think journalism is supported? By advertising. You can’t whine on the one hand about cutbacks and then whine on the other about revenue. I think it would be a mistake to hand over the page to an advertiser; it would be a mistake to blur the line between ad and edit on the page. But as Giner points out, lots of Europeans have taken ads on their front pages for year. And the front page of NYTimes.com has an ad, too.
Yet another example of the fundamental corruption of the ad-supported media business model.
It’s the imperative of any business to drive down costs and increase revenue. Under the ad-supported media model, journalism falls in the cost category, while ads are in the revenue category.
Voila! Less journalism and more ads.
And it’s only going to get worse for those who are hanging on to the ad-supported media model. Consumers are going to realize the real dollar value of their mindshare and take control.
MyMindshare.com — it’s the future.
And if media isn’t supported by ads, how is it supported?
Subscriptions? Ha!
Ninety-eight percent of all journalism is just a commodity. Specific news stories or subjects may not have exact substitutes, but in aggregate most of what the average newspaper produces is easily replaced by other media choices consumers might make. That’s one element of declining readership, as it is. Digital just accelerates the pace.
There are way too many choices for consumers now. Why should I pay for the Podunk Daily News when there are about a trillion profiles on MySpace that I haven’t seen yet? Or maybe I can just click over to Ebay for a little shopping. And Craigslist is always fun to sift through. I’m sure I’ll find out the news from some other source later.
That’s the attitude of millions of people now, and in most cases, we’re not even asking them to pay for what we produce.
Many of the sacrosanct rules of news and advertising were invented in an era when newspapers were monopolies or near monopolies. Those days are over. Forever. Journalists need to get real about the new world they live in and find ways to make a positive contribution, not act as obstructionists.
Seems to me, from looking at archives of lots of papers over the years, that plenty of papers ran ads on section break pages and even “ear ads” on A1 before the advent of multisection, departmentalized papers roughly in the 1970s.
I think the notion of a “clean” A1, B1, C1 etc. also gained momentum when newspaper designers (yes, I was part of that community at the tail end of this movement) pushed to have ads removed during the evolution to departmentalized sections.
I’m old enough to remember it was common for papers as late as the 1960s and early 1970s, especially those with decrepit letterpress installations, to have only a couple of very thick sections with many content departments scattered in different orders on different days. Many of those papers had ads on the split.
But as design became more a newsroom specialty, designers wanted clean palettes for their poster-page feature fronts, color “wild art” photos and giant information graphics.
Meanwhile, readers never gave any indication they couldn’t tell the difference between journalistic and commercial content on the same page. We just assumed they couldn’t.
British newspapers used to have the entire front page as adverts until sometime in the 20th c. IIRC there are a couple of local papers that still do so
Jaki Degg…
I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. nice read….