In Non-Competitive Newspaper Markets Maybe It’s Time To Go Back To The Good Old Days – Get News Off the Front Page And Give It Back To Advertising

Philip Stone March 7, 2008

If newspaper publishers are really serious about seeking new business models so they have the money to produce a great local editorial product, thus maintaining and increasing circulation, then in non-competitive markets maybe now is the time to dump news from the front page and give all that prime space to advertising.

Heresy, you say! Not at all. It is just going back to the good old days. Have you ever wondered why so many newspapers had in their masthead the word “Advertiser”?

There’s such a hue and cry in the US every time another newspaper dares to give some front page space to advertising. But the true question is, in a non-competitive market, why not hand over the front page entirely to the advertisers. It’s prime real estate. Advertisers will pay true premium rates for it, and does it really matter if the top news of the day doesn’t show up until pages two, three, or four (if you’re going to sell the entire front page then you might as well try and sell pages two, three, and four as well.)

So by now you think this is all a big joke. Far from it. Very serious. With newsrooms being decimated and digital not taking up the financial slack for some years to come something drastic has to be done, so why not go back to what worked in the past. All too often at our peril we forget from history what has worked before.  

Would it surprise you that the august Times of London ran only personal classified ads on its front page until 1966? Would it surprise you that it was until well after then that in Finland the first few pages of metropolitan newspapers used to be entirely display advertising sold at very premium rates – talk about a license to print money!

And since many newspapers today are in non-competitive markets what difference does it make what’s on the front page? You either subscribe to the paper or you don’t, and in those non-competitive markets  there’s not that many newsstand sales made because the headline catches one’s attention.

All of this comes to mind after reading an interview by the American Press Institute (API) with Richard Honack, assistant dean, chief marketing officer and adjunct associate professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

He told API, “One of the first things newspapers need to do is step back and look at the world around them to realize their customers are not waiting for ‘news’ that happened on a deadline-driven cycle. The majority of ‘news’ customers are past ‘what happened’ – they want to know ‘how it happened.’ The days of the ‘Front Page’ have been gone for a few years. We live in a ‘nanosecond’ world and newspaper buyers now read the paper for comfort when they have time. For the most part, the majority know the news, scores, stocks, and anything else deadline-driven almost simultaneously on their mobile phone, computer, or 24-hour cable news channel.”

So if the urgency for “front page” news is gone, and the most urgent problem publishers are dealing with these days is how to bring in enough money to support the type of editorial product that a community demands then something has to give – so why not give the front page, and the following pages if sales could be that successful, to advertising?

The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times have experimented with using spadias -- a back page advertisement that wraps around the entire section of the newspaper and creates a flap covering part of the front page of the section -- similar to a wrapper that covers the entire back page and almost a quarter of the front of the section, wrapping around the section’s spine. In Europe free newspapers sometimes have a wraparound covering the whole front page of the newspaper, containing the paper’s masthead, and the page is given over to advertising and then inside is the true front page.

Editorial purists will recoil in horror at such suggestions, but which is worse, giving over the front page and other pages to advertising and earning the revenues needed to provide a credible editorial service, or keep the front page for news and keep firing journalists when revenues don’t meet margin requirements? Many metropolitan newspapers reported double digit percentage revenue declines in January over a year ago and things are expected to only get worse. It’s time for radical treatment and this is about as radical as it gets.

This reporter started editorial life after university at the San Jose Mercury-News in California. Today that newspaper is continually in the news for all the editorial cutbacks it has been forced to make under Knight-Ridder and Media News ownership, and this Friday journalists are going through the agony of having to stay at home until 10 a.m. waiting for a phone call telling them whether they still have a job.

But back in 1969 the then AM Mercury and the PM News were licenses to print money. This was a time when the Silicon Valley was full of fruit trees with not a silicon chip to be found, but the area was developing to such an extent that the beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains were a distant memory lost in the smog. It was when the newspapers were just Ridder papers – there was no merger yet with Knight.  The newspapers were full of display and classified advertising and it was said at the time the morning newspaper had held some sort of national advertising record for several years and the San Jose papers were the financial engines for all the Ridder papers. Curiously, circulation didn’t move much even though its only real competition came from San Francisco some 50 miles (80 kms) north. Those advertising revenues had allowed Ridder to build what was then the world’s largest single-story newspaper plant.

Thus it came as a great surprise when the following story started making the rounds. No one ever proved it was true, but in that building, large as it was, where there was smoke there was usually some fire. Advertising, the story went, had been told that in spite of how well it was doing it needed to do better and Joe Ridder ordered a presentation of how it was to be achieved.

The idea advertising came up with was ingenious, and simple. Advertising was built up from the bottom of a page towards the top. Whatever space at the top had not been sold was the news hole. But it was obvious that the way the eye traveled one looked at the top of the page and remembered what was there far more than what was at the bottom.

So, simple solution to boost advertising revenue -- build the ads from the top down rather than the bottom up, and charge more. Whatever space was left at the bottom of the page became  the news hole.

If you think about it, very clever, and very simple. And in a newspaper known for a management that fully backed the advertising department this had to be a sure-winner. But for whatever reasons – whether Joe Ridder believed this was one-step too far, or perhaps his editorial senses told him this would cause mayhem in the newsroom – he turned down the idea, a very rare defeat for advertising. If he had agreed it would have literally turned the newspaper advertising market on its head!

In today’s newspaper world it’s time to take such radical relooks  at how newspapers are put together. Advertising taking over the front pages and the first inside pages, advertising at the top of pages with news below – all ideas abhorrent to journalists, but perhaps necessary for print to survive.

And if these ideas allow journalists to keep their jobs, and for the newspapers to continue serving their communities with a quality editorial report in print and not just digitally, then it seems everything needs to go onto the table. Doesn’t mean you have to like the ideas but with newspaper publishers these days being ruthless in their cost-cutting maybe it’s time for ideas that don’t include getting rid of journalists?

Just take a look at the local editorial product the Mercury-News produces today compared to what it did when the monies flowed in, and we rest our case!