Tepid shopper interest last year forced retailers to cut their year-end forecasts and resort to heavy promotions to move merchandise. This helped newspapers eke out a 3.8% gain in Q4 retail advertising, on a par with the industry's 1999 spending level. Is another promotion-heavy season newspapers' best hope? "I think we'll see promotions again this year," says Kathleen Brookbanks, managing director of media planning and buying firm OMD Midwest in Chicago, which places ads for retailers like Dell Inc. and J.C. Penney Co. Inc. "When they're depending on taking business from others, they go back to what works for them, and newspapers will do well."
It's déjà vu all over again in Vancouver, where the venerable alt-weekly is under attack from B.C. Liberal ministers. In what Publisher & Editor Dan McLeod calls "the biggest threat in its 36-year history," the Straight has been stripped of its status as a newspaper under provincial sales-tax legislation and assessed fines and penalties that will total more than one million dollars by year's end. McLeod, whose paper was "prosecuted frequently under a wide assortment of trumped- up charges" in its early years, calls the new attack "a politically motivated attempt by the government to silence one of its harshest critics."
David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, was the first journalist to report that a July 14 piece by conservative columnist Robert Novak was potential evidence of a possible White House crime. In that article, Novak, citing “senior administration officials,” disclosed that the wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson was a CIA operative. In a piece this week for LA Weekly, Corn explains how he broke the CIA-leak story, and why nobody noticed.
When it comes to buying advertising time, some habits die hard, like what appears to be a single- minded focus on targeting broad demographic groups. In television that demographic is adults 18-49 and in radio it has long been adults 25-54.   But advertisers are starting to move away from targeting all-encompassing groups, helped along in the past few decades by the emergence of media outlets that concentrate on niche audiences. In radio the percentage of ad dollars targeting the 25-54 demographic has been falling for the past seven years,
For years, NBC's central marketing pitch to advertisers, agencies, TV critics and the trade press alike has been the value of the network's adult 18-49 audience. It has even gone so far as to proclaim it is the only demo that really counts on Madison Avenue. But on Wednesday, the peacock network revealed its real demographic bottom line to Wall Street: adults 25-54.
Though a stalwart in the American pastime of drunken competition, foosball is just another "beer pong" to most -- something to do with friends as your head buzzes and liver throbs. But there is a tightly knit worldwide culture lurking beneath the game's surface that encompasses the most -- and least -- loved elements of professional sports: comeback wins, grudge matches, gambling, groupies, drug dealers, superstition, madness, tradition, titles, trophies and, of course, cash. Nathan North reports from the 2003 Pro Foosball Championship in Dallas.
A survey of California residents during the gubernatorial recall race shows diminished faith in political ads when they traditionally peak--as Election Day draws near. And the Golden State election may be an indicator of how media, advertising and voters interact in the next presidential election.
How fast the market for local advertising is recovering — or even if it is recovering — has become a subject of intense speculation along Madison Avenue. For those arguing whether or not there is evidence of a comeback, the answer echoes that from the old Certs commercial: Stop, you're both right.
Two years after the Taliban fled Kabul, there is still a lot of hope in Afghanistan. Optimism is frequently voiced, some of it even genuine, though it hardly balances the anger and despair. Ben Ehrenreich visits this damaged country and finds Westerners trying to help -- sometimes bizarrely -- and Afghans trying to cope, even to understand.
