Wall between editorial and advertising

If they want a full page of Local U. shit, make them buy a full-page ad.

 

What you've done is monetize content.
Whoopee.
Papers have been doing this for years, either suck it up or express your outrage — at following a time-honored newspaper practice — by resigning your position.
Honestly, why the eff do you think newspapers run outdoors copy? To get the places that cater to hunters and fishermen to buy advertising that runs with that copy.
Or maybe your shop buys those NASCAR pages that are designed in blocks, so chunks can be pulled out, and replaced with ads.
Or maybe your shop does a football tab? An entire section devoted to getting people to buy ads, that would run with the content. Whoa. I hope I just didn't blow your mind hole.
This isn't a big deal and has been done this way for decades.
So you have a page on the local college, more often than not, if your paper is doing its job, your going to have a page worth of copy. All you are doing is packaging that copy onto a page and then the ad department sells that page.

 

But what do you do when the businesses buy smaller ads than in the past or just don't buy ads any more?

 

I don't have a problem with monetized content at all. I do have a problem when advertising dicatates content beyond what the publication would otherwise publish of that content. I don't think many places that have outdoors pages lack for things to fill an outdoors page because there is probably more demand for that niche than there is space to fill (it works that way at my shop, where we have tons of outdoors readers and two outdoors pages a week). I also don't think anybody wishes they could take a page out of their football tab to run baseball boxes. I would lump the prepackaged NASCAR page with the Local U. page in terms of your hands being tied by an ad. It's not a good idea because in the times of the year where your overall product suffers from having too large of a percentage of your content devoted to a single theme, the costs outweigh the benefits of the revenue from the ad.

 

the wall at my weekly operation id like the berlin wall. editorial and advertising dont even like each other... at all. to the point where threats are being made by each side to side to do this that and the other thing. not good at all.