Advertising
What's happening Around the Web
One of our functions here at the Center is to be "surrogate readers" for Texas community journalists. Keeping up with the fast-changing world of community journalism has never been harder, and community journalism is now the "hot" area in mass communications.
But you have a paper to put out, and a Website to maintain. A few of you may even have a life.
So we'll help you keep up with what folk around the nation are saying about our field — about community journalism specifically and the wider world of newspapers and news Websites in general.
November 1, 2009
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Readers share their papers with more than two additional readers
A new National Newspaper Association survey has yielded some results that will be useful for advertising salespeople who are selling the value of a community newspaper ad buy. Here are the stats you will want to pass along to your salespeople:
- On average, readers share their paper with 2.36 additional readers.
- Nearly 40 percent keep their community newspaper more than a week.
- Three-quarters of readers read local news "often to very often" in their community newspaper.
- Among those going online for local news, 63 percent found it on the local newspaper's website, compared to 17 percent for sites such as Yahoo, MSN or Google, and 12 percent from the website of a local television station.
- 60 percent read local education news "somewhat to very often" in their newspaper, while 65 percent never read local education news online.
- And finally, something to brighten the day of everyone in your ad department: 47 percent say there are days they read the newspaper as much for the ads as for the news.
And in other survey news, community newspapers experienced a slight decline in circulation volume in the second quarter of this year compared to the first quarter, down about 2 percent as a group, according to the latest audit data from Circulation Verification Council.
The CVC survey said 45 percent of community newspaper publishers reported that circulation increased, with the heaviest declines in the Southeast.
August 8, 2009
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New hope for ad sales, especially among community newspapers
Fitz & Jen point to a Borrell Associates report that indicates advertising revenue might finally be on the rise. The best part for community newspapers is that the report expects "much of the upcoming growth to come from community and suburban papers."
June 25, 2009
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Ad experiment targets local, low-budget advertisers
This is definitely an advertising concept that I can see working for community newspapers. The Nieman Lab has a story op about MinnPost's experiment with "real-time advertising." They're sort of a technologically-updated version of classified ads that are powered by micro-updates from businesses.
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A few suggestions for ad growth
Jen from Editor & Publisher has a few suggestions from Ed Strapagiel of Kubas Consultants about how to improve ad sales. Among his suggestions: stop selling in lines and inches. You'll have to pay for the full report from Kubas, but the snippets shared by Jen are interesting in themselves.
June 8, 2009
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Advertising spending down 12%
Compared to the first quarter of 2008, advertising spending is down 12 percent, according to Nielsen. That's a decrease of $3.8 billion, the company reported today. Local newspapers are down 14.3 percent, according to the company's findings.
June 6, 2009
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Print ad sales down almost 30 percent
Statistics just posted on the NAA website show that print ad sales were down 27.9 percent in the first quarter of this year. Online sales fell 13.4 percent.
But the worse news was what happened to classifieds, where sales fell an astounding 42.3 percent.
Newspaper ad sales for last year were off by 16.6 percent, which the NAA said was the worse 12 months in the recorded history of the industry.
