OK, imagine that you're a state district judge running for re-election in Texas. You're being primaried, and elements in your own party recruited the opponent. (The particular judgeship is for the full county, and at the same time is the only district judgeship in the county, to finish the scenario.)
You're doing ad buys in the local papers and on websites for local radio as well. Maybe a few voice ads as well.
No teevee in the county, but two small-regional commercial broadcast stations are in the next county over.
Why do you have ads on the website for at least one TV station that is in the next market to the WEST, nearly 100 miles away?
This isn't hypothetical, it's real and happened in North Texas. If this was a purely programmatic buy, then some programming needs to be fixed, unless the ad cost was dirt cheap even for Internet buys. Nobody in the Texoma area watches Wichita Falls teevee, or, presumably, regularly visits the websits of stations there. (I stumbled on it while looking for something else.)
If it wasn't a purely programmatic buy, it's an even bigger head-scratcher.
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Monday, March 16, 2020
Will coronavirus help or hurt newspapers?
Many newspapers are banking on it helping them, especially on the readership side, but Jon Allsop of CJR says there are problems lurking, primarily on the ads side.
I'm going to start with him and go further.
Paper dollars have long since become digital dimes, and per my extension of that, digital dimes have become mobile nickels. Per Allsop, Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab says the virus — businesses shuttering, or limiting hours, or in food and entertainment, limiting patrons, as parts of the problem — could further undercut advertising in general.
But for Benton, and as referenced by Allsop, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
What if there is a recession? And, I'm assuming that's fairly likely.
Remember, more and more medium and larger chains are owned by hedge funds. New Gannett / Craphouse. Dead Fucking Media / Digital First. Possibly McClatchy in the near future. Possibly Tribune and/or Lee. McC, Tribune and Lee all have Alden holding significant minority stakes. Then there's the walking zombie called CNHI, in its own category. And Advance, which essentially has already committed to a print-drawdown strategy toward eventual digital near-first.
What if the hedge funds, in the face of a recession, do yet more cutting? In a sense, from inside the industry, that's hard to picture. In another sense, it's not hard to picture at all. That's issue NO. 1.
And, that's even though such cuts aren't necessary.
Take Dead Fucking Media. Per The Intercept, it had a 17 percent profit in its fiscal 2017. Some papers were as high as 30 percent. That's good for pre-Internet days!
Now, some ad-side specifics.
Online, Benton says many advertisers (perhaps except those already selling out of certain products and they don't need ads) don't want placement next to coronavirus stories. That's more a big newspapers than small newspapers issue, but still.
The wipeout in sporting events. (Not that sports advertising has ever been much of a draw on the print side, but still.)
Next, the circ side.
Benton notes that your community daily is still often hand-delivered. It's hugely unlikely that COVID passes with a thrown newspaper. BUT? What if the mainly older subscribers start panicking?
On the digital side, it's wonderful that many media outlets have dropped paywalls.
But, 19 years ago, in a newspaper world that was still mainly print, did we get free newspapers for a week after 9//11?
Allsop doesn't discuss this part.
But I think it's likely that bigger newspaper companies seeing this as a way to permanently hook a whole bunch of new readers are barking up the wrong tree.
I'll venture no more than 10 percent of this new readership hangs on after the paywalls go back up. Since parents can get school district info on Facebook pages or Twitter, and ditto for others, I wonder how much new readership happens anyway, since AP and Reuters can be found without paywalls as is.
I'm going to start with him and go further.
Paper dollars have long since become digital dimes, and per my extension of that, digital dimes have become mobile nickels. Per Allsop, Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab says the virus — businesses shuttering, or limiting hours, or in food and entertainment, limiting patrons, as parts of the problem — could further undercut advertising in general.
But for Benton, and as referenced by Allsop, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
What if there is a recession? And, I'm assuming that's fairly likely.
Remember, more and more medium and larger chains are owned by hedge funds. New Gannett / Craphouse. Dead Fucking Media / Digital First. Possibly McClatchy in the near future. Possibly Tribune and/or Lee. McC, Tribune and Lee all have Alden holding significant minority stakes. Then there's the walking zombie called CNHI, in its own category. And Advance, which essentially has already committed to a print-drawdown strategy toward eventual digital near-first.
What if the hedge funds, in the face of a recession, do yet more cutting? In a sense, from inside the industry, that's hard to picture. In another sense, it's not hard to picture at all. That's issue NO. 1.
And, that's even though such cuts aren't necessary.
Take Dead Fucking Media. Per The Intercept, it had a 17 percent profit in its fiscal 2017. Some papers were as high as 30 percent. That's good for pre-Internet days!
Now, some ad-side specifics.
Online, Benton says many advertisers (perhaps except those already selling out of certain products and they don't need ads) don't want placement next to coronavirus stories. That's more a big newspapers than small newspapers issue, but still.
The wipeout in sporting events. (Not that sports advertising has ever been much of a draw on the print side, but still.)
Next, the circ side.
Benton notes that your community daily is still often hand-delivered. It's hugely unlikely that COVID passes with a thrown newspaper. BUT? What if the mainly older subscribers start panicking?
On the digital side, it's wonderful that many media outlets have dropped paywalls.
But, 19 years ago, in a newspaper world that was still mainly print, did we get free newspapers for a week after 9//11?
Allsop doesn't discuss this part.
But I think it's likely that bigger newspaper companies seeing this as a way to permanently hook a whole bunch of new readers are barking up the wrong tree.
I'll venture no more than 10 percent of this new readership hangs on after the paywalls go back up. Since parents can get school district info on Facebook pages or Twitter, and ditto for others, I wonder how much new readership happens anyway, since AP and Reuters can be found without paywalls as is.
Thursday, March 12, 2020
Could we see a Lee-Tribune merger this summer?
It would make a fair amount of sense from both the vulture capital world and the clustering world.
The second first.
As I noted in my piece on Lee Enterprises acquiring Warren Buffett's papers, Lee bigly wanted the Omaha World-Herald. Already owning the Lincoln paper and several others in eastern Nebraska, plus several in Iowa, it made huge clustering sense. (That said, a lot of things make clustering sense, but newspaper companies don't always do the legwork to realize the benefits on either the news or the advertising side.)
Now, expand the picture.
Lee's flagship is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It's headquartered in Dubuque, Iowa. It has papers in both southern and northern Illinois. And, of course, Tribune Publishing's flagship is the Chicago Trib. A merger here gives you a big clustering across northern Illinois, Iowa and northeastern Missouri.
And, it makes sense from the vulture capitalist angle, too.
As I also noted in that piece, after Lee bought BH's papers, Alden Global Capital bought 6 percent of Lee. And Joshua Benton at Nieman reports it's deepening its claws in the Trib.
It can't do more there until June 30, per a "non-aggression pact"? But afterward? Or increasing its Lee shares in the meantime?
Late last year, looking at that date, Nieman's Ken Doctor suggested the country's five largest papers chains could become two on or shortly after that date. I tweeted him that the Lee-BH combo is probably No. 6 and that the Alden moves would set up something like this.
Let's then spin this back to clustering.
The Trib owns the Baltimore Sun and the Annapolis papers. Lee got a bunch of Virginia papers with the BH acquisition, the biggest of them being Richmond. You could put those three dailies together for some Beltway commuter tabloid, el cheapo USA Today type regional tourism mags and more.
Now, would a Lee-Trib merger be touted as a move to drive off Alden, or would Alden instead, via third-party investment vehicles, be secretly ramrodding it?
The second first.
As I noted in my piece on Lee Enterprises acquiring Warren Buffett's papers, Lee bigly wanted the Omaha World-Herald. Already owning the Lincoln paper and several others in eastern Nebraska, plus several in Iowa, it made huge clustering sense. (That said, a lot of things make clustering sense, but newspaper companies don't always do the legwork to realize the benefits on either the news or the advertising side.)
Now, expand the picture.
Lee's flagship is the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It's headquartered in Dubuque, Iowa. It has papers in both southern and northern Illinois. And, of course, Tribune Publishing's flagship is the Chicago Trib. A merger here gives you a big clustering across northern Illinois, Iowa and northeastern Missouri.
And, it makes sense from the vulture capitalist angle, too.
As I also noted in that piece, after Lee bought BH's papers, Alden Global Capital bought 6 percent of Lee. And Joshua Benton at Nieman reports it's deepening its claws in the Trib.
It can't do more there until June 30, per a "non-aggression pact"? But afterward? Or increasing its Lee shares in the meantime?
Late last year, looking at that date, Nieman's Ken Doctor suggested the country's five largest papers chains could become two on or shortly after that date. I tweeted him that the Lee-BH combo is probably No. 6 and that the Alden moves would set up something like this.
Let's then spin this back to clustering.
The Trib owns the Baltimore Sun and the Annapolis papers. Lee got a bunch of Virginia papers with the BH acquisition, the biggest of them being Richmond. You could put those three dailies together for some Beltway commuter tabloid, el cheapo USA Today type regional tourism mags and more.
Now, would a Lee-Trib merger be touted as a move to drive off Alden, or would Alden instead, via third-party investment vehicles, be secretly ramrodding it?
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
A doozy of an error, or set of errors it turns out, by Merrill Perlman
Or is it by the OED and she's just repeating it?
The howler was on "autocrat," which she says began with Catherine the Great.
Actually it's two doozies, though the etymological one caught me first.
Perlman claims the "-crat" back half comes from Russian. No, really.
Catherine the Great was the first to call herself an “autocrat,” in 1762, in her manifestoes that began: “We Catherine II. by the Grace of God, Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias,” the Oxford English Dictionary says. And yes, “auto” is from the Greek for “self, one’s own, by oneself, independently,” though the “crat” comes from Russian.This classics major laughed in his Greek grammar, knowing that κράτος is the Greek word for "state" or "state power," as in the common everyday English word "democrat."
Then, doing a web search for a piece on its etymology, my second suspicion was also confirmed.
No, Merrill, per this, Catherine wasn't the first to use it. She may have been the first to call HERSELF that, but ... that's nitpicky. The word was around before her in various languages.
Actually, this too isn't nitpicky, but just wrong.
The history minor began wondering as well. And yes, Byzantine emperors used the title (in Greek of course) to translate the Latin "imperator." And, per that link, Catherine wasn't even the first Russian to use it! It was Peter the Great!
I saw the piece last Thursday and Tweeted that I expected a public correctly at CJR, not just a Tweet back. Her actual column only appears about every two weeks. A correction need not wait until then.
On Twitter, I got a response about it the next morning:
Quoting the OED etymology on how it came together, and referring to English usage.— Merrill Perlman (@meperl) March 6, 2020
Well, then the OED is wrong! (And I'm not paying $90 a year to check on it.)
In addition, I further know it's wrong about "-crat" as a graduate divinity degree holder. Post-Nicaea Eastern Christianity referred to Christ as "Pantocrator," among other things.
We'll see if any correction is in the offing; I have my doubts, given her response, and no response to my response to that. (I told her the OED was wrong.)
A month later, the piece remains uncorrected.
We'll see if any correction is in the offing; I have my doubts, given her response, and no response to my response to that. (I told her the OED was wrong.)
A month later, the piece remains uncorrected.
Thursday, March 05, 2020
How much is that online paper or mag spying on you?
Read just how much Outside tracks your ass with cookies, analytics, Facebook, etc., if you don't wear lots of online condoms on your browser to protect yourself. And that page notes that, for browsers like Firefox, "do not track" signals are ignored.
I found that link as part of a story on my main blog about an Outside story on the National Park Service and budget cuts. I had looked for ads about concessionaires in and near national parks, and then other non-concessionaire businesses in neighboring towns, when I saw that link.
To summarize?
Seven different analytics links.
Eight tracking tools.
Facebook Connect beyond that for "functionality."
Plus the "we don't currently respond" to do not track signals.
Plus the old tut-tutting of "certain features on our platforms may not work" if you block our cookies.
Know what?
I.Dont.Care. I hope it doesn't, in the sense of making it harder for you to track me.
Beyond that, if your website won't work that well without that much spying, you've got problems anyway.
Beyond that, targeted advertising doesn't work as well as marketing people claim.
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