The Sunday Newspapaer

Well, it’s Sunday and the tree killers knows as the print media are out in force today. The Sunday paper is the largest of the 7 days papers because the theory is that more people actually read the thing. There’s also the advertising money factor.

TV Media bases their advertising rates on the ratings of various shows as measured during two periods during the year. These “sweeps week” periods are when they actually deliver to the watching public. The rest of the time, it’s usually re runs and hype excitement. These are the people that wonder why they’re losing viewers to almost every other media type…and this includes cable stations.

Anyway, with the newspapers, they base their ad rates on subscription rates. The more subscribers, the more readers, the more people who will see the ads so the rate per reader can seem to be lower. Here in the Denver metro area, the Rocky Mountain News had one of it’s major subscribers “buy” a years subscription to the paper for a whole blocks of the town.
The result: Increased subscription rates! Yep, more readers! No matter that the people now receiving the paper didn’t actually BUY the subscription themselves. So I asked myself, why would a something like this happen?

ANSWER: The newspaper was dropping in subscribers and was having an increasingly difficult time justifying their ad rates, so they needed a way to increase subscription rates. And apparently they were unwilling to actually deliver something of value that the people were willing to pay for.

The large advertising wanted a good deal on their ads. The advertiser was a large car dealership so they regularly spent a big money in the newspaper.

So everyone’s happy I guess. Except the people who are now cleaning up 7 papers a week from their driveway and putting them directly into the trash.

And the trees are probably not very happy either