Newspapers alive and well! For Real! On November 5 anyway

It would have been a bad idea, BYH. You might have gotten lost and not known how to get home. Best to leave the driving to those who can.

 

Yeah but my wife might have liked that.

 

Don't these extra editions end up costing papers large amounts of money. You can't charge the advertisers extra. Guess it's good for the PR aspect anyway.

 

Most readers don't know that. Fuck the PR. PR isn't what is killing the industry right now. It's not getting enough money for advertising; especially online.

The readers may be down in print, but they are WAY up on the interwebs.


http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008811020453

"But if readership remains strong thanks to Web page visits, publishers have yet to figure out a way to turn all that online traffic into revenue. As print ads decline, online ads today provide only about 10% of newspapers' total revenue."


Yet it accounts for way more than 10 percent of the readership.

 

Well, we put out an eight-page special section on Obama today. No ads but I guess they figure people are going to want to buy more souvenirs. As to the execs, that's what I was thinking when I posted that last post, how could you not think ahead and realize this was going to be something special? Of course, how could you not realize the power of the Internet for like 13 years?

 

So there's the answer to all our financial woes.

Just get a black guy elected president. Every day.

So simple, I don't know why I didn't think of it.

 

Obama's election and what it did for newspapers is akin to someone with VD getting a shot of penicillin.
Now the trick is to find something to make the cure long term.

 

Who gets a shot of penicillin anymore? Or penicillin, for that matter.

 

Get the clap and you'll find out very quickly who gets the shot. LOL

 

Dredging this up because I've seen this idea thrown around a few times in the last week, but this was the only thread I could find.

Terrible idea, because whatever money we gained from it would be negated by a loss of standing in the community. They'd see it as price-gouging, and possibly trying to price a historic keepsake out of the hands of working class and African-American readers. Not saying they'd all be right, just that we'd look pretty crummy doing so.

 

Besides, lot of joints are doing it now with their "posters" of the front page. Some have multiple sizes, framed and unframed, available at $25, $50 and beyond. Better sell 'em fast, doesn't seem like something with a long shelf life.

Although I still might buy me a "Dewey Beats Truman" Chicago Tribune page to frame and hang on my office wall the day I leave newspapering for good. A little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of the industry's classic stupidity to remind me why I'm gone.

 

Also, wasn't Obama's campaign widely regarded as the most Internet-savvy in history? He announced his vice presidential choice over Blackberrys or something, I recall, and generally went new-media rather than old media for the past year.

So one day of commemorative reprints is the least he can do for the dead-tree society. But I wouldn't expect him to be tailoring many messages, going forward, for newspapers' benefit.