As Times Get Even Harder Are Newspapers Selling Their Editorial Soul?

Philip M. Stone August 7, 2008

Is it just coincidence that there’s a 3/4 page auto review of the new BMWX6 written by editorial and then directly below it a display advertisement by the local dealer? In these days of disappearing newspaper advertising revenues, and even radio and television being hit with revenues diverted to the Internet, one in five senior American marketing managers admit they have bought advertising in return for a news story, and it’s a practice that is no doubt in use globally. So much for the Chinese Wall between sales and editorial.

According to the Marketing Management Survey of 252 chief marketing officers and higher, a full 10% said they had an implicit or non verbal agreement that in exchange for a favorable story they would buy advertising. One in 12 actually admitted giving a gift for the editorial coverage.

The survey, sponsored by PRWeek and Manning Salvage & Lee (MS&L) comes as a surprise, if for no other reason that the marketing people actually admit this is all part of the game. It’s basically undisclosed product placement, but more important once a media entity is caught doing it can its news be trusted again? Talk about playing with fire. Mark Hess, MS&L CEO, summed it up best, “Any kind of undisclosed paid placement spells trouble for consumers, the media and the marketing industry.”

But these are hard times for the media, particularly newspapers, so it’s time to take our weekly look at what print is doing to save costs and generate revenues (besides layoffs and buyouts):

• The Wall Street Journal is trying to save costs for its Saturday edition by telling its student subscribers  that their subscription will now be Monday – Friday rather than Monday – Saturday. Since the subscription comes with free access to wsj.com the newspaper points out that all of the Saturday material is available online for those who still want it, and if need be, a Saturday print edition can still be delivered by completing an online form.

• Staying with a Murdoch newspaper, the largest UK daily newspaper, the tabloid Sun with about 3 million circulation, has announced a price decrease from 35 pence to 30 pence. That flies in the face of many newspapers that have been raising their prices, and now makes The Sun 20 pence a day less than the Daily Mail and 10 pence less than the Daily Mirror, both also tabloids. It was Murdoch that started a UK circulation bloodbath 13 years ago between the so-called UK quality newspapers by cutting the price of The Times by 50%. The competitors all followed and while The Times stabilized its falling circulation and then started to increase readers, the overall effect was a financial bloodbath for UK national newspaper owners. It was only a couple of years ago that The Times finally signaled an end to that price war by raising its price to match its main quality competitors who had already raised their prices after not being able to afford such losses. Now another price war at the tabloid level?

• The Cambridge, Maryland Daily Banner, founded in 1897, may need to consider a name change since this week it has reverted to printing twice weekly -- on Wednesdays and Fridays. But it does have a web site updated daily, so maybe that’s a fudge that allows it to keep its name.

• A weekly newspaper in Alabama with 8,000 circulation, The Linden Democrat-Reporter, has raised its newsstand price to $1 from 75 cents. “I set trends, I don’t follow them,” explained publisher Goodloe Sutton. No other Alabama newspaper costs $1.

• The Louisville Courier-Journal has always claimed it was the first newspaper to set up the position of public editor, basically an ombudsman for readers. And now it can lay claim, after 40 years, of being the latest newspaper to eliminate that post.

• Lee Enterprises is combining two Idaho daily newspapers and three weeklies into a single daily newspaper that launches Aug. 18. Fourteen employees will lose jobs.

• Apart from public editors and movie critics it seems newspapers no longer have use for editorial cartoonists. The latest to offer a buyout to its cartoonist is the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. That in turn brought harsh words from Nick Anderson, president of the American Editorial Cartoonists, who proclaimed, “Everyone understands that these are tough times for newspapers, but they have gone from full panic mode to suicide mode.”

• The Seattle Times has put up for sale two large parcels of land it owns in the city totaling more than four acres (1.6 hectares), said to be worth around $32 million.  The company has already put up for sale its newspapers in Maine.

One goal of many media buyouts is to get rid of the old-timers so they can be replaced, if necessary, by lower cost youngsters. But that ploy might be running into trouble.  In a report called All Eyes Forward by Vickey Williams as part of the Learning Newsroom project it seems that the young are not only disenchanted in buying a newspaper, but also disenchanted in working for a newspaper.

Williams wrote that young journalists “are turned off by the tendency of veteran journalists to argue down new ideas, cling to old ways, and avoid risk.” She said that studying 10 newsrooms she found that “A majority of younger journalists (age 29 and below) in nearly every pilot scheme seemed to us to be saying, ‘We’re leaving because the changes we see as necessary aren’t happening fast enough.’”

So at least publishers and young journalists see eye to eye on one thing – that change is not coming fast enough. Publishers want the Internet to bring in quicker than ever revenues lost by print, and the young want more than ever for their new ideas to take root on how to do that. Is it rocket science figuring out there needs to be some meeting of these minds?