One of the hardest concepts for readers to grasp is how different the same day’s paper is depending on where you buy it.
I’m often baffled myself. Deadline issues dictate why some readers get some stories that others don’t. But sometimes it has nothing to do with deadlines.
In this space last Saturday I wrote about the AJC’s new and improved Buyer’s Edge section that focuses on shopping and consumer information. The newspaper had been heavily promoting the new section for more than a week, and I wanted you to know that some of the standard shopping-type features that had been in Thursday Living were switching to the Saturday section, which would be available to all readers.
That was wrong, as dozens of you who live out in the state and on the periphery of metro Atlanta let me know. It is available to the vast majority of our readers, but isn’t distributed outside of an 18-county region around Atlanta .
Why? Because Buyer’s Edge is what we call a “zoned” product. Its news and advertising content vary from one region to another. The rates advertisers pay are determined by how many papers we deliver in each zone, and advertisers are free to buy one or as many zones as they want.
If you look at the newspaper you got today, for instance, there are probably several “zoned” sections — for homes and cars, to name two — that vary widely from one region to the next. On Thursdays in metro Atlanta we publish a dozen zoned community editions with local news and advertising. They all differ in size and content.
A Saturday version of Buyer’s Edge, available to about a quarter of our readers, has been around for a couple of years in zones limited to the northern suburbs of Atlanta. The new section is now much more widely distributed and includes several additional zones.
But it’s not going to all readers. It’s going to those targeted most by the advertisers in the section. And, at least for now anyway, that is confined to 18 counties around Atlanta.
Lingerie ads
I remember when lingerie ads that ran in American newspapers were the daily equivalent of the old Sears & Roebuck catalog ads for the same products. You never saw the model’s face and rarely saw much in the way of skin. There was no suggestiveness in the models’ poses and, unless you really, really had a vivid imagination, there was nothing prurient about them at all.
(Of course I also remember when the elevator operators at the old Stewart Dry Goods store in Louisville, Ky., would announce that the third floor was “men’s haberdashery and ladies’ foundations.”)
Sometime around the 1980s, I think, the ads started including faces and full body shots of the models, but they were still relatively tame. That was in the days when the Victoria’s Secret catalog was about as risqu a form of advertising as could be had.
We’ve come a long way since then, as a number of AJC readers noted with a combination of remorse and anger when the paper’s main news section on Wednesday included a two-page advertisement in soft, muted colors for a new line of lingerie being promoted by singer-actress Jennifer Lopez at Rich’s-Macy’s.
The ad — there was one full page that included no copy that I swear is suitable for framing — pictured the same drop-dead gorgeous woman in two outfits. In the full-page picture she was wearing a “triangle bra” and an item called a “fanny wrap.” (Think of it as a tutu that’s made to be untied, and since there didn’t appear to be any other clothing under the fanny wrap, that seemed to be what was under consideration.)
The other photo was of the model wearing what can best be described as babydoll jammies. (This one could have been a Playboy magazine cover photo, circa 1975.)
We generally try to work with our advertisers to allow them to promote popular products and new lines, within some guidelines for taste. Given what is available on TV, movie screens and the Internet these days, the lingerie ad was no big deal for many readers. But for a general circulation newspaper, it seemed to cross into new territory.
Once such a line is crossed, it’s only a matter of time before another one is approached.
