Even More Reason to NOT Subscribe

It was announced at our shop we're "total market coverage" on Tuesdays only. This begins next month.

So. More printing costs. More delivery costs. Every single home in the city gets a copy.

Why in the FUCK would anyone subscribe to a paper that a) they can get free on the doorstep b) uploads the PDF version for free online and c) puts every story on the website for free.

Spend more. Generate less. What a plan.

 

Ad-department oriented . . . clearly.

 

I thought I'd be ridiculed for mentioning that my shop puts up links to four stories per week online for free. However, people have to pay for an online subscription to see PDFs of the entire paper, plus have access to our archives.

I'm beginning to think my shop actually had the right idea.

 

When we used to do this, the publisher would go nuts to insist that we put our BEST work in Monday's paper, the TMC day.

We had to have some kind of enterprise story every Monday, which (because we had no Sunday paper) was usually a big coverage day for us. We tried to slot our enterprise stuff on Tuesday & Thursday (and Saturdays in the FB/BB off-season). So, while we pushed Monday hard, our small 2-man shop got killed for content later in the week.

He used to push us onto "3-day packages" that would go Saturday-Monday-Tuesday ... the people who would get the Monday paper would then "need" to subscribe to get the Saturday one, and they'd go out and buy the Tuesday one.

The TMC idea was killed. Now, they instead have micro-local weeklies that target different areas in the circulation area, and have a mix of original content and refers to the (subscription-only) daily.

 

At this point, I have no problem at all with giving away newspapers in some form or fashion for a time. Better than some of the other uses for money that some places have come up with.

 

A-Men.

"Hey, if we are giving out more papers and getting more eyes, then we can raise rates ..."

Will go over like a wet turd.

 

We've done TMC several times now but I can't say it's resulted in any increased subscriptions or more ad buys. We did TMC two days this month to hit up a small town in our area because the school board was going to consider making another paper it's official paper. They wanted me to write some stories about sports in this small town for the TMC days, but there wasn't anything going on there because it's, you know, a town of 250 people and the school year ended two weeks before the first TMC!.

 

Doesn't work that way. You can't sell advertisers, at least not ones with any semblance of intelligence, on TMC products because there's no way to determine who's reading the thing.

The reason we still sell subscriptions isn't because we make money on them; we never did. We sell them because it allows us to present to advertisers that we have 5,000 or 20,000 or 200,000 people who pay to get this thing, and that therefore it stands to reason the vast majority of them actually read the thing.

If you're throwing the paper in every single driveway, you can't tell who's opening them and looking at the ads and who's letting them stack up in the driveway and get soggy.