How much of a fight should I put up over this?

I am the SE, which is why it really bothers me that I wasn't even told about it until I saw the friggin' thing at the top of my page. Worse, my ME isn't even here for me to vent to about it.

I'm not sure whether to be comforted by the fact that this is happening in a lot of places or really pissed off about it. I think I'm a little bit of both.

You know, if I didn't already get the newspaper for free, I'd stop buying it once I saw that shit. It's like a pop-up ad. It's the kind of thing that really pisses me off. Maybe I overreact, but I just hate advertising in general. Have for as long as I can remember.

 

so crucify me but i really don't think you're in a position to have much say on a business decision like that with the exception of the alcohol/preps issue that someone mentioned. and i really doubt anyone is going to cancel a subscription over it.

 

Ads on section fronts are, as others have suggested, fairly common these days. My former shop put a 6x1 at the bottom of 1A around four years ago and now offers small rectangles on the top corner of section fronts as well.

I'm a realist, so I understand the money issue. In fact, I took a job on the dark side (advertising dept.) a few years ago after getting bored in the newsroom.

My peeve is the way the ads get sold (or don't get sold). When we rolled out the 6x1s, there were only a handful of advertisers lined up, all on short contracts. What we ended up with for a long time was an ad on 1A two or maybe three times a week and promos for our advertorial sections, online products (real estate, jobs. automotive, etc.) the rest of the time.

It got worse once the initial contracts expired and some of the advertisers did not renew. It's only been in the last 12-18 months that we've sold that position with any consistency.

The same thing is happening now more or less with the rectangles. A couple of car dealers buy it on weekends, but then it's returned to editorial use on days when it's not sold, which is inconvenient for the copy desk.

Having said that, at least we started with a policy that only allowed image advertising -- no price and product ads. The rules have been relaxed a little bit recently, but there's still no "Artichokes 4/$1" crap allowed.

 

BigPern,

I feel your pain. I don't particularly like the strip ad across the front of our section. But I figure with the state of the industry, if that's going to bring in enough cash to prevent layoffs, so be it.

 

At my last job, in a three- to four-page section, we had a third-page ad on the bottom of our front sports page. I think it was there for about three weeks, and it was always a pain in the ass.

I don't know what the paper got for the ad, but it better have been a nice chunk of change. But the consensus of the sports section was that it was the last thing people wanted to read anyway, at least that's what the upper-management said.

 

Every man has a price, and mine is there too.

 

The beer ad on the front is a little too much. I'd have a serious problem with that, especially if you're covering preps. At the shop I mentioned, we had a 2 x 2 ad for a porn shop that ran in Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday's paper (inside of course). We had pretty big sections, so the porn ad ran on a page by itself. I went like five months where I ran the LPGA next to the porn ad, just to keep all the women together (Picture of woman in lingerie in the ad). My proudest moment was in a Monday paper where we had the porn ad and an LPGA story with Cristie Kerr kissing a penis-shaped trophy after winning an event. Good times.

 

The Lubbock paper runs an ad that covers 2/5 of the front of the sports page, at least it did the last time I saw a few years ago.

 

I am in now way being flippant about this, but be glad they're selling ads to put in new places instead of taking entire pages away because there aren't enough ads being sold.

 

this isn't something to go off on somebody about. you should have been told ahead of time, but it's not like you were going to be able to do anything about it anyway.
would you prefer they sell ads for your cover or layoff staff?
does it suck? yes, but just move on. fight bigger battles than that one.

 

We have the same thing on our 1A.

If you read the design thread, you'll see that I've been one of the people charged with coming up for a template for an all-promo Sunday front.

And what a pain in the ass it's been trying to design around Tony's Ristorante.

 

Can you splain that?