Serious news readers sometimes look at the front section and decide that ads are ruining the paper.
Not by their content (which I occasionally hear complaints about, especially the underwear ads) but by their abundance. One e-mailer took time recently to provide a detailed page-by-page calculation of a Thursday paper, finding that news filled just 40 percent of the A section.
An anomaly? Or a fact of life today in the newspaper business?
Fact of life, according to Monroe Dodd, editor for newsroom operations who is responsible for keeping the newsroom within its budgeted allotment of news space over the course of a year. He said the average in the A section was 60 percent ads and 40 percent news.
Some background: The reason the A section seems so full of ads is that it’s the most coveted spot for advertisers. They prefer the prominence of the first section that carries the front page.
“We deny them A-1 and A-2 so we can communicate the top news most effectively, and we deny them most of the jump page (for story continuations) to try to make the section more convenient,” Dodd said. “The compromise is to let them have some of the rest of the section.”
It means many of the inside A-section pages are more ads than news.
The section selected by the reader for his analysis (July 26) was six columns, or about one page, short of what the paper typically budgets for Thursday news space. One week earlier, for example, the Thursday A section included 32 columns of news, about average.
Newsprint is the newspaper’s second-largest expense, behind payroll. Because of the high cost, newsprint is carefully monitored. Dodd explained that by controlling the expense of newsprint on “average” news days, the paper can add pages on big news days and stay within budget for the year.
Big news days, for example, include the one after the plane crash that killed Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, his son and top aide. To offer more complete coverage, the paper added two extra news pages on short notice. Other times, the paper plans to go over budget to run a big series, such as the six-part Sierra Leone series, or even a one-day story, such as the recent articles on the 20th anniversary of the Hyatt Regency hotel skywalks disaster.
Although the A section often carries the biggest and splashiest ads, other sections, particularly Sports Daily and Business, appear with a much smaller percentage of ads and larger news allotments. “Off limits” pages to ads include the fronts of the Metropolitan, FYI, Arts, Travel and MoneyWise sections; the cover of “Star magazine”; and the editorial pages.
I empathize with the news hounds who prefer a bigger slice of news in the A section. But I also hear regularly from those who want certain ads, and surveys show the Sunday ad inserts, for example, are the second best read part of the Sunday paper, just behind the A section. Some of the unhappiest callers are readers who didn’t get a favorite grocery ad or other sale ads. Some ads appear in all papers; others are distributed by ZIP codes, at the advertisers’ request.
Subscriptions and single-copy sales provide about 20 percent of the newspaper’s revenues, with advertisers carrying the rest of the load. Classified ads, particularly help-wanted job ads, drooped this year as the economy tightened and as competition from the Internet grew. That dropoff also adds to the squeeze on the news space.
The Star is part of the Knight Ridder chain, which recently cut 9 percent of its work force nationally (6.7 percent locally) in response to the advertising declines and newsprint price increases. Newspaper executives try to balance competing — and often contradictory — interests among readers, advertisers, investors, employees and the community at large. It’s always a difficult balancing act.
