When a sales proposal is laughably wrong

OK, I'm in publisher, not editor, mode, right now, at my small town paper.

Somebody from corporate drafted (for my predecessor, actually) details for a sales proposal presentation to one of the two new car dealers here in town.

It said that, if you the dealer bought X amount of advertising, you'd need just one new car sale to more than pay for the ad campaign.

What was wrong?

It assumed that the dealer gets 100 percent of the car sales price.

And the dealer ain't looking at it that way, of course.

He's looking at his net. Smaller community, fewer luxury vehicles sold, with the partial exception of a "loaded" SUV or truck, and we'll say his average margin is 6 percent.

That means he's got to sell 15-16 vehicles or so to pay for that ad campaign -- 15 or 16 that he's reasonably sure he wouldn't have sold without it. (This doesn't count any increased volume in used cars, service contracts, etc., so I may be skewing things a bit heavy his way.)

That said, you get the general picture.

And, this is coming from somebody from higher up my food chain.

Sorry, even if coupons aren't great, and people don't always bring them in, I can see how, on a higher-dollar product, especially, a business is looking for some way to track metrics. And, if I use one of those lines as a sales line, that people sometimes forget coupons, or don't always remember where they saw a special, and use it too openly, then I'm actually discounting our newspaper's potential ad reach even more.

Being a publisher at an independently incorporated newspaper

But one that is still corporately owned?

I think it's like having one testicle.

My guess is that individually incorporating newspapers, or small groups, is for tax reasons and little else.

I think it means little to nothing as far as any degree of additional independence from HQ, while possibly meaning that the buck stops even more with you the publisher at times.

Well, that's life.

I'm not a 1 percenter.

If things change, they change.

I had had forgotten why I left this newspaper company before

Any company, not just a newspaper company, that only offers one week paid after one year, and never offers more than two weeks paid, should not be surprised if it does not necessarily generate long-term staff loyalty.

Of course, I am glad to have landed on my feet from my previous newspaper company which, less than five months after replacing me (and having been "pushing" me before that) is now looking for the replacement for my replacement.

Folks, in any industry, high turnover isn't good.

I am also grateful for what I'll be learning on the publisher side of stick. I hope it includes skills that, if necessary, will transition outside the newspaper industry.

Oh, and I forgot ... telling a pregnant employee she is eligible for up to 6 weeks unpaid leave. The FMLA says 12 weeks. Now, technically, this employee has been here less than a year and is ineligible for FMLA, but .. if she had been here a year? Would be the same, I'm sure.

Media pay rising? NOT! Huff Post NOT real journalism

One Caroline Fairchild at the Huffington Post, who must be an actual paid staffer if she's got a HuffPost email account, claims media wages have shown their biggest climb since 2006.

Ahh, but she forgot, or didn't analyze, this the nut graf (emphasis mine):

The job category, which comprises public relations jobs [and] media and communication workers as well as entertainers and performers, saw a 4.6 percent increase in wages, outpacing the national average wage increase of 3.5 percent for the year and far surpassing any wage increases in the industry since 2006. 

Let's be real.

If you worked in an actual media job, your pay remained flat. If you worked in PR, it went up.

As a commenter there notes, a lot of the PR/communications hike was possibly election-related, too.

If you worked in an actual media job, your pay stayed flat — unless your job disappeared.

More refutation of Ms. Fairchild?

In Philly, the owners of the Inquirers and Daily News are threatening to shut BOTH and liquidate if they don't get "major concessions."

Public will pay for media content

A new survey says the public will pay for media content — if the need/reason is adequately explained.

"When participants were provided with a compelling justification for the paywall -- that The New York Times was likely to go bankrupt without it -- their support and willingness to pay increased," Cook and Attari concluded.

Again, take that Jay Rosen Jeff Jarvis Clay Shirky and other new media fluffers who tout "no paywalls" for selfish reasons:.

That said, the survey authors note that many people will believe the “information wants to be  free” quote out of context and misinterpreted means they should get newspaper stories for free:

Those publishers should also consider this cautionary note: a majority of The New York Times readers surveyed by Cook and Attari said they wouldn't pay for content and made good on their threat, often by switching to free providers. "The decline reported in our study is echoed in the decrease of over 3.3 million unique website visitors reported in The New York Times marketing materials between the spring of 2011 and 2012," Cook and Attari wrote.

Of course, with more and more papers adopting paywalls, that option is shrinking. The key will be AP (and Reuters and AFP) continuing to up their rates they charge news aggregators.

A newspaper where pets matter more than people?

Via a newspaper exchange, I get copies of my former newspaper, the Marble Falls Highlander, at my new location.

Well, I knew it offered to run pet obits, but we didn’t get any while I was there.

What I didn’t know until now was that, although obits for people are free for the first 500 words, the pet obit has a minimum charge of $10.

Never heard of such a thing before, with a newspaper valuing pets above people. That said, readers can probably insert jokes about this if they want, and there’s nothing I can do to stop you.

Digital newspaper circulars — good news or bad?

Short-term good, long-term bad? Or, the other way around? A growing consortium of newspapers is backing Wanderful Media, a company that creates digital versions of newspaper circular inserts. It is a way of looking to the future, to have a digital version of the grocery store and hardware store flyers online, yes. OTOH, in at least a certain percentage of digital readers, are they already going to Target.com or whatever anyway? And, as newspapers' complains over Valassis' deal with the USPS show, print circulars are still an important part of newspaper revenues, so ... if this leads retailers to abandon print circulars sooner rather than later, it could be a big issue.

I doubt this will come to non-daily papers any time soon, so no hurt there. And, bigger seven-days will still attract plenty of print-version circulars. Smaller dailies, though? At some point, retailers participating with Wanderful may make a take-it-or-leave-it digital-only offer to some of these papers, perhaps playing them against Valassis/Red Plum on mail-out versions of print circulars.

Especially if smartphone/tablet apps are next, this is another gift horse that may not pony up well for the longer term.

And, of course, there are other issues involved. One I can think of is, will these digital circulars get past ad-block extensions or not?