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Topic: Letters Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 5/15/2007 11:08:59 AM
Title: How many NFL ads are in the sports section?
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From JEROME WEEKS, book/daddy: In his CNN coverage of the National Book Critics Circle's campaign to save book review pages and book editors' jobs in newspapers, Howard Kurtz made this remarkable statement about newspaper ad revenues: "Newsroom budgets are strapped these days and publishing companies aren't doing as much print advertising. That is how it works. Food sections get supermarket ads. Auto sections get car ads. Travel sections get vacation ads. Since book reviews deal with exactly one product, it's hard for them to survive without plenty of publisher's ads." (The transcript can be found here.)

Let's apply this inventive analysis to the other sections of the paper: Ads from professional teams must support the sports section -- good luck finding a single display ad from the National Football League, by the way -- while criminals and the city school board must support the metro section. Federal agencies underwrite a newspaper's Washington bureau, letter writers and angry cranks buy ads to pay the editors and the op-ed columnists their salaries and, oh yes, umbrella salesmen and hail repair specialists must surely buy ads because otherwise no paper would run a weather map.

Instead of Mr. Kurtz' fanciful notion of newspaper finances, I would suggest this process as a more accurate version of events: Rather than being forced by a lack of book ads, when there never were many book ads, newspaper managers are choosing from the many areas of the paper that do not directly fund themselves. They are choosing to gut international, national and cultural coverage because they've lost all faith that their reporters and critics could supply anything worthwhile or sufficiently different from whatever's available on wires or online.

Instead, they're bravely concentrating their efforts on local areas where they have, essentially, little or no competition. [Permalink]

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