Like many people who spent their careers putting mostly black ink on white paper so it could be thrown on people's porches at 5 a.m., I have been worrying about the future of newspapers. Most of the content newspapers provide is available free online and many of our best advertisers have found they can reach their best customers more efficiently using lower-cost, Web-based alternatives.
One of the essential facts newspaper ad people never talk about is the inherent inefficiency in newspaper advertising — and that this inefficiency is what drives profitability. In fact, the old Newspaper Advertising Bureau created a clever marketing name for the phenomenon — The Thin Market Concept — and used it to get customers to buy more ads.
San Diego Reader senior editor Judith Moore's book, "Fat Girl," got the full-page treatment in last week's New York Times Book Review. Jane Stern writes that Moore's book "just might be the Stonewall for a slew of oversize people who do not fit the template of what every ostensible expert on beauty, health and nutrition tells us we should strive to be," and judges it "brilliant and angry and unsettling."
Robert Kasner, senior vice president and circulation director for Village Voice Media, died of liver cancer last week at the age of 53. Since 1998, Kasner oversaw the process of getting a quarter-million copies of the The Village Voice off the press and delivered to 1,700 locations. He also led the paper's battle against city rules that imposed tight restrictions on the free-newspaper industry. In an obituary in this week's Voice, publisher Judy Miszner says that Kasner "had an amazing intellect and kindness about him."
Because sometimes winning a Pulitzer just isn't enough: Willamette Week's Nigel Jaquiss also won an award from Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. (IRE) for "The 30-Year Secret" -- the same work for which he won the Pulitzer yesterday. Qualifying as a finalist was New Times Broward-Palm Beach's Bob Norman for "Sick District," his investigation into the mismanagement of Broward County's tax-assisted public health care system.
LOCAL AD SPENDING ONLINE BALLOONED 28 percent to $2.7 billion last year, according to a report released Monday by research company Borrell Associates. The report, "What Local Web Sites Earn: 2005 Survey," based on a survey of Web sites of 2,177 local media properties, predicts even higher expansion--46 percent, to $3.9 billion--this year. Local marketers of computer-related services spent the largest proportion of their ad budgets--7.3 percent--online, followed by bars and restaurants--3.3 percent--and business-to-business advertisers--3.2 percent. Borrell defined local advertising as "advertising placed by locally based businesses for locally focused online messages."
Nigel Jaquiss, a staff writer at the Portland, Ore., alt-weekly, received the prize in investigative reporting for "his investigation exposing a former governor's long concealed sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl," according to this afternoon's announcement on Pulitzer.org. He beat out finalists from The New York Times and The Des Moines Register.
Chicago Reader staff writer Steve Bogira's book, "Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse," was published this month by Alfred A. Knopf. By detailing the happenings at Chicago's Cook County Criminal Courthouse over the course of one calendar year, the book shows how the war on drugs is overloading the justice system and threatening the integrity of due process. A review in The Economist calls it "a brilliant piece of journalism and a genuine eye-opener" that "provides the context, both locally and nationally, for understanding what is going on."
Peter W. Cox's book, "Journalism Matters," was brought out by Tilbury House in February. Cox, who acted as publisher of the small alternative paper he co-founded, did much of the work for which the editor, the late John Cole, gets credit, writes Sam Pfeifle in The Portland Phoenix. Pfeifle describes Cox as a proud man who "was fiercely independent, and would not bend his integrity, but he was open and honest, and always accountable to his readers."
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