The summer of scandal in the newspaper circulation business has left advertisers and agencies worried about what could possibly be next. Most say they are placing increased scrutiny on audience statements and newspaper ad budgets, though they believe the power of the medium will protect it from any immediate advertiser backlash.
Experts predict the brand-ad rebound is more sustainable than the boom that buoyed dot-coms in 1999 and 2000, in part because it's being led by the offline world's big brand builders -- including Coca-Cola (KO ), Nike (NKE ), and Visa. While paid search advertising, where companies buy placement in search results from sites such as Google (GOOG ) and Yahoo, was all the rage in 2003, online branding is gaining steam this year and may become the strongest growth story of Net advertising in 2005.
Owner, publisher and editor of the Sun since 1966, Steve McNamara addresses his sale of the paper to Embarcadero Publishing in this message to his readers. He writes, "Being editor and publisher of the Sun has been a dream job, way better than working the oars at the dailies in North Carolina, Miami and San Francisco where I started out." And he's leaving his legacy in good hands. About the paper's new owners, McNamara says, "In the newspaper business there are some real egomaniacs and general nut cases, but these guys are at the other end of the scale."
Two AAN newspapers serving different parts of the San Francisco Bay Area became part of the same organization today as the owner of the Palo Alto Weekly, Bill Johnson, purchased the Pacific Sun of Marin County. The sale coincides with the 70th birthday of Sun owner, publisher and editor Steve McNamara, who purchased the paper in 1966 and grew it into an award-winning newsweekly. McNamara said, "Once the decision [to sell the Sun] was made, it seemed natural to pass the responsibility to my old friend Bill Johnson and his associates at the Palo Alto Weekly." Said Johnson, "Steve and I have known each other and shared our challenges and ideas with each other for the last 25 years, and this seems like a natural outcome of that relationship."
While the newspaper world struggles to recover the faith of advertisers after an unprecedented series of circulation scandals and battles with the Internet's threat to local ad sales, some good news for the industry emerged Tuesday. Total newspaper ad expenditures rose 4.1 percent for the second quarter of 2004 to $11.5 billion versus the same period last year, according to preliminary estimates from the Newspaper Association of America.
In an example of the new economy taking a page from the old, MSNBC.com adopted a longtime newspaper strategy yesterday, starting an online classifieds site. The service, part of the broader joint venture between Microsoft Corp. and NBC News, lets users search for employment, real estate, personals, merchandise, and other types of listings from sites including eBay, cars.com, HomeGain. com and Match.com.
In the July 2 edition of the Boston Phoenix, reporter Jason Vest revealed the identity of Anonymous -- author of "Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism" -- as CIA analyst Michael Scheuer. Other print and online media outlets have since published his name. Writing for Slate, Jack Shafer then wonders why the Washington Post and the New York Times continue their attempts to perpetuate Scheuer's deflated anonymity. Writes Shafer, "James Risen reports in the Aug. 5 New York Times that Anonymous is 'known publicly only as Mike,' which is true if the definition of the public doesn't include the readership of the Phoenix."
The filmmaker pulled his three-page essay from the Village Voice at the last minute because he didn't approve of the paper's choice of art for its front cover. According to the New York Post's Page Six gossip column, editor-in-chief Don Forst wanted to run a still from the film "Brown Bunny" in which actress Chloe Sevigny performs oral sex on Gallo, the film's star and director. Gallo, however, wanted the Voice to run his photo self-portrait, claiming its full-page publication was a condition of his involvement. Voice publicity director Jessica Belluci told the Post, "When he got wind that we wanted to use another image for the cover, he got all bent out of shape and pulled the whole thing."
The Dallas Morning News' recent circulation disclosures certainly aren't helping the industry move beyond the scandals previously announced by Newsday, Hoy and the Chicago Sun-Times. "The fact that four newspapers (three companies) have disclosed circulation overstatements has been a real shocker," wrote Lauren Rich Fine in a Merrill Lynch report released today. "Now, of course, there is concern that more companies will step forward with disclosures, especially in view of Sarbanes-Oxley," a new federal law requiring more financial disclosures from publicly traded companies.
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