Alternative newsweeklies may fill more than half of their editorial space each week with contributions from freelancers. But how do editors go about finding the writers who are willing to work erratic hours for modest pay and yet are professional enough to deliver prose that not only comes in on time but sings? Writer Marty Levine collects the wisdom of several AAN editors who explain how they found their best freelancers, how they keep them content and what pitfalls to avoid.
Jeralyn Merritt, a Denver criminal defense lawyer who uses her Web log to promote her liberal views about the criminal justice system, never considered selling space to advertisers. Then she got a call from Henry Copeland. Since then, the Democratic National Committee, presidential candidate John Kerry and congressional candidates have advertised on her blog, www.talkleft.com. In March, the ads generated $1,000 in revenue
Creative Loafing Charlotte "is still waiting for some kind of clarification or retraction after a March 16 WCNC-TV report that had a Charlotte-Mecklenburg vice officer saying that CL is kind of a pimp for illegal 'spas,'" Shannon Reichley writes. No one on the broadcast accused the daily Charlotte Observer, which runs the same ads, of pimping, the alt-weekly's media columnist complains. Still, she's never liked the fact that the two papers earn cash from businesses she describes as legitimate but "sleazoids."
On Wednesday, Publishers Information Bureau reported that total magazine rate card revenue totaled slightly more than $4 billion in the first three months of the year, up 7 percent year-over-year, even as the total amount of ad pages sold fell 2.3 percent to about 48,000.
Shampoo makers, brewers and other companies that generally pitch products on television are turning their sights to newspapers, helping foster a nascent advertising recovery for the medium after a stubborn slump.
Backers of a new model hope to tap one of the last ad-free frontiers of the Internet -- the text of articles and message boards -- in what they bill as the ultimate contextual advertising play. Industry watchers question whether the new form of pop-up ads will be tolerated by online readers. But the IntelliTXT system, which rolls out today, is drawing the ire of journalists and others who say it not only blurs the line between advertising and editorial, it erases it.
Presidential-election years typically mean choppy waters for advertisers, but this year's race is shaping up to be more like a perfect storm. The candidates' hefty war chests, the ferociousness of their attacks so early in the season, and the strategic media plans that concentrate their spending in 17 battleground states will likely combine to knock many advertisers off the air, according to a memo the American Association of Advertising Agencies plans to issue to its members today.
Media-based advertising, which fended off a threatening shift toward consumer and trade promotion spending during the late 1980s and early 1990s, is once again losing share of marketing budgets. While U.S. ad spending has pulled out of recession and managed to expand at moderate rates, promotional and trade spending have been growing at much faster rates, according to the results of an annual study released last week by the Promotion Marketing Association and PROMO magazine.
The Denver weekly's Julie Jargon won an Investigative Reporters and Editors Certificate for her story "The War Within," about two female cadets who were punished and kicked out of the U.S. Air Force Academy after they complained of being raped. IRE judges noted that the article "is a great example of tackling a sensitive story at a powerful institution."
Marty Beckerman was in a Washington, D.C., bookstore in March pushing copies of his new book, "Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-Up Session with Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace." Mike DeBonis reports on the early success of the 21-year-old American University student. While Beckerman was a summer intern at New York Press in 2002, then editor John Strausbaugh helped him connect with a literary agent. The young author tells Washington City Paper the deal he struck with MTV/Pocket Books should get him through a semester of college.
