A way to measure the value of journalism: 1 news story = $55m

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News is not in trouble

Print news is in trouble.

I work for a marketing company that does a lot of PR. In the last 2 weeks we had 5 stories (1 just taped this afternoon) for 1 client on TV. 4 were NYC local and 1 was national on one of the big 3 networks. We lost one scheduled network spot due to Hurricane Dean. This was a 9 day long event in NYC.

We had one time smaller coverage on Bloomberg TV, CNBC, CNN. The CEO had his smiling face and a few words plastered all over cable business news. After the appearance, he got to walk out into Time Square and see his company?s logo plastered on a 60 foot high screen and fed to the cable news outlets.

Further, we had continuing coverage for the week on the news channel of a major cable provider.

There are far more broadcast outlets for news today than there were just 10 years ago. With the growth of specialty cable channels, that reach grows. Local TV news has expanded tremendously. In NYC, six channels go on air at 5 AM and continue till 9 AM.

All of that has meant more broadcast news jobs for reporters, producers, desk assistants, cameramen, etc.

Daily newspaper coverage, for the same client/event was zero. They simply didn?t care. One of the major news services (for newspapers) used to cover this same thing daily every year, but dropped it last year. This lack of newspaper coverage was not lost on the marketing people, who are in charge of ADVERTISING, at our client.

Newspapers are just bloody stupid in their approach to their business. Their biggest problem is that they overprice their major source of revenue ? ads. At home I get 3 different ?shopper? papers delivered via mail every week. They?re full color and about 60 pages each. That?s about 180 ad pages that my local newspaper is not getting. The reason is that they charge too much.

If 3 different crummy ad papers can afford to print and mail a 60 page color publication every week and GIVE it away, why can?t the newspaper charge one-third what it charges and quintuple, or more, its ad pages? Again, they?re stupid.

Then the newspapers cut news because ad revenue is down. There?s less to read so people stop buying the thing. Then ads decrease due to lower circulation. The paper cuts again. You get the picture.

Another problem with papers is that they under work reporters. Go look for reporter bylines at ?major? dailies. You find that someone had like one a week, sometimes once in a month. Compare that to TV where reporters can do 3 a day. We?ve worked with papers in cases where the story took 4 weeks from pitch to print. That?s ALL the reporter was working on. That?s just silly. At the same time, we?ve done TV gigs where we called in the morning, sent a backgrounder via email to a producer, and were covered in the afternoon.

Of course we could also talk about how ticked off many newspapers, especially large city ones. have made the one-half of the population that leans conservative, with hopelessly biased coverage. That?s for another day.

Posted by: j.m.galvin   Posted on: 08/22/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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