4/3/09: Another tree-saving, newspaper-killing DLD

In 2005, when I was working for Safeway in San Rafael, I had the good fortune of getting some free-lance work with Media News Group’s Marin County edition.   Fifty bucks to write a high school football game wrap?  Great work, if you can get it. 

Later, I was able to make full-time (albeit-less-than-$14/hr) work out of it, getting hired first as the sports editor of Novato’s community weekly, and then as a sports writer for the Media News Group Vallejo edition.  But when I quit to move to L.A., I was looking forward to going back to making $50 per article with the Media News Group, L.A. edition.  Alas, that work hasn’t materialized.

So when I started up a high school sports blogspot for free, and even later when I joined examiner.com where they pay a cent per page view generated, I felt like I wasn’t competing with the newspapers so much as I was auditioning to join them.  Amidst all the voices saying Newspapers Are Dying, I keep thinking, “Well, they still pay better.”

That may be the case, but according to this article by Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield, that’s only because while the Internet may already have caught and past newspapers in terms of audience captured, the ‘net still hasn’t figured out how to translate “audience” into “revenue.”   The Internet’s practically-infinite supply just far outstrips demand.

Yeah, that about sums it up.  As (my former Ad Age colleague) Rothenberg details, “Today the average 14-year-old can create a global television network with applications that are  built into her laptop. So from a very strict Econ 101 basis, you have the ability to create virtually unlimited supply against what has been historically relatively stable demand. 

So the biggest online publishers, with all their vast overhead, have no more access to audience than Courtney the eighth-grader.  And there are hundreds of millions of Courtneys, millions of them on Google AdSense, driving the price of ad space, down, down, down.

I always feared that the future of advertising was best predicted by Minority Report, in which retinal scans and surveillance cameras allow the bastards to follow us with their direct marketing from one monitor to another.  But here’s one optimistic note in an otherwise frustrated article—maybe the ads of the future will be entertaining and beautiful rather than intrusive. 

Rothenberg also acknowledges the problem of ad avoidance, as evidenced by average click-through rates approaching zero.  Yet, for all his economic realism, he stubbornly insists there’s a solution: “Better advertising.  More informational.  More entertaining.  More beautiful.”

Anyway, the article fails to contradict the general consensus that newspapers are dying too, so I may get old and grey waiting for my next $50 per article dream job.   

[Late edit by this post’s author, mjdittmer, dismayed that other than font-formatting issues, the body of this DLD has failed to generate a single word of discussion.  I guess this is where I should have put, ‘Anybody else have any feelings/experience/opinions to share regarding the dying industry, good or ill?’]

Sorry, enough about me.  How about a Ray Ratto column (about last night’s game, no less)?

And let’s see if I can embed video.  No?  Well, the preview for Sasha Baron Cohen’s next movie, coming this summer, can be found here.  Dump away!