Tweet
Newspapers are in trouble. Big, end-of-the-road death spiral big trouble. The Boston Globe was recently pulled off the market because its owners who shelled out $1.1 billion for the paper were a little upset at the $35 million offer plus assumption of some debt that they received.
This isn’t pennies on dollars, this is pennies on hundreds of dollars. Nice.
Yesterday, we saw even more hard, bad numbers for the newspaper industry.
On a comparable basis, ABC reported that for the 379 newspapers filing with the organization, average daily circulation plunged 10.6%…
Every six months, these papers are losing big time readers. Like:
The San Francisco Chronicle lost more than a quarter of its daily circ, down 25.8% to 251,782. Sunday was off more than 22% to 306,705.
Being a long since reformed economics major, I can tell you, you lose 25% of your business every six months, it’s not long, no business left to lose.
So I suppose we should be sympathetic with the newspapers as they take every single dollar of advertising revenue they can come up with, but recently, we saw a full page ad in The Washington Post that showcased the problem with the newspapers themselves.
The Washington Post accepted a full page ad, retail value in the range of $40,000, from a group called “Energycitizens.org.” Now, you might think that The Washington Post would want to have this group put a disclaimer on their ad, because this group is fully-funded by the oil companies. In fact, it is a project of The American Petroleum Institute.
Now, I am sure The Washington Post will say, we can’t verify who is actually placing the ad, we’re too busy cashing the $40,000 check to stay afloat, but I think they have a responsibility to their readers to explain who is putting the ads in their paper.
Of course, the real issue here is the false claim within the ad. From MediaMatters.org.
On October 15, 2009, EnergyCitizens.org ran a full page ad in the Washington Post falsely claiming clean energy and American power legislation would “cost two million American jobs.” In reality, an American investment in clean energy technology would create up to 1.9 million green jobs across every single state.
So the American Petroleum Institute runs an ad under another name in The Washington Post and makes a blatantly false claim in the ad. It doesn’t surprise me that energy companies are going to lie about clean energy but it does surprise me that The Washington Post is accepting money and helping them do so.
Is this false advertising? I think so. And false advertising is illegal. It’s too bad there isn’t prosecution on things like this, and all of the clean energy smears out there. A lot of people see them, though of course, 10% fewer people than would have seen them six months ago.
5 Comments
Alan Grayson used the word “whore” figuratively.
It applies here too.
It is grossly partisan behavior and favoritism of the kind you describe that is killing newspapers, in my opinon. People tolerate advertising as the price of getting news. But once the “news” IS advertizing, the deal is off.
Our local, small-town rag has been the propaganda arm of the local Republican Party, the Realtors, and one of the big-box, hard-right pseudo-Churches for 20+ years. All of a sudden, circulation is plummeting–they can’t give it away at the food store. They can’t understand it, and lament the rise of blogging! Yet, miracle of miracles, someone is now resurrecting a competing paper–a weekly–from a century ago to fill the void and give us some local news.
That is wonderful news.
I have no sympathy for the San Francisco paper. A friend of my husband works there.
Do you think I as an activist illegally spied on could get him to listen to me? Not a chance. When I realized all the papers were actively helping in the Bush torture program with cover ups, my life sunk to a new low.
You got it a little wrong. this is still a free country and anybody that can pay, can buy an add and say whatever they want. The post does not have to ask if the add is accurate or not, it really is not responsiable for the content paid for in an add.
I don’t like this, and I’m sure You don’t like this. The Post wasn’t doing the advertizing so it has no legal culpability. On moral grounds was is so bad that it was worth them refusing to run it when they need every dolar the can get. That’s not for me to say, but I doubt it.
One of the few pieces of schadenfreude I ever get these days is watching how all the MSM’s right-leaning coverage and corporate whoring doesn’t avail them; ad revenues keep going down. Serves them right.
(They and the Democrats are making the exact same 180-degrees-wrong mistake. Idiots.)
Personal anecdote: I saw how the Newark Star-Ledger’s weekday circulation was down 22% over the past year, tied for second worst.
We were one of those cancellations, precisely because they kept thinning the paper, so that little of what I had considered the value was still there.