Tomorrow is Father’s Day. If you needed a reminder, the Journal-Constitution’s major advertisers made sure you got it several days this week.
On Tuesday, for instance, the main news section of the paper contained 28 pages — 22 of which were full page advertisements for either Rich’s or Macy’s, most of them aimed at getting customers to their stores for Father’s Day purchases.
The second section of the newspaper, which was also labeled the “A section” and numbered with pages 29 through 34, contained nearly three full pages of ads.
The third section was eight pages — all of them containing ads for Rich’s.
“If I want ads, I use catalogs,” said Lloyd Gayton, a reader from Concord, Ga., echoing a common complaint we heard during the week from dozens of readers.
Friday’s paper also contained a larger-than-usual advertising complement.
The Father’s Day advertising extravaganza this past week is an extreme form of the daily push and pull the news department of the paper goes through with the advertising department, whose revenues cover most of the expense of producing a daily newspaper.
Put yourself in the position of the vice president for advertising at a major metropolitan newspaper. You show up for work one day and find that two of your most dependable and coveted advertisers — in the middle of one of the slowest advertising markets in a generation — want to buy more than 30 pages of space in the front section of the newspaper next Tuesday to promote special Father’s Day sales.
What do you do? Say “no thanks”?
So the real issue becomes one for the news department and the production department to handle. How do you do that without sacrificing the news?
Here’s how: In order to accommodate a bulky A section (28 pages) the presses that print the newspaper have to be “balanced” by another similar size section.
In Tuesday’s paper, the D section, which was Metro, became the balancing section. It was increased in size from its normal eight to 10 pages on most Tuesdays to a reconfigured 28 pages.
In exchange for losing some of its traditional “news hole” space in the A section, national and international news was transferred into the second A section and into Metro. The front of the second A section, for instance, contained a major story and color photos of the wildfires in Colorado.
The reconfigured Metro section was drawn up in a way that resulted in an additional 10 full pages of news on Tuesday. Some of it went to Metro news, but a lot of it was stories that normally would have run in the A section.
The quirkiest result of the reconfigured paper was when the three @issue pages of editorials and columnists finally showed up at the back of the second A section, on pages 31, 32 and 33. I don’t blame readers for saying they had a hard time finding the editorial pages that day since they usually find them on the last pages of the first section.
But the bottom line is that nothing in the way of news coverage, story count or regular daily offerings was missing from those advertising-dominated papers. In fact, the paper on Tuesday carried much more news than it usually does on that day of the week.
Is it the best way to present the news? Of course not, and we do it rarely. Interestingly, the same thing — to a much lesser degree — happened the week before Mother’s Day. Advertisers have their own way of determining when they want to attract customers to come to their stores for special sales and promotions. Most of the time, the big Sunday paper — which readers come to associate as being much more dominated by ads — works fine for that. But other times they may determine that a one-day sale on Wednesday is the way to go and they want to use the Tuesday paper to tell their customers about it.
We want to be there when they do. We also want to make sure the news report doesn’t get shortchanged in the process. We may need to spread that day’s news throughout the paper more than we usually do, but we won’t give up the space needed to provide a complete report.
You don’t want that and neither do our advertisers. They buy space in a “news” paper. They don’t want it to be a catalog either.
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Contact Mike King by e-mail at insideajc@ajc.com, by phone at 404-526-5819, by fax at 404-526-5611 or by writing P.O. Box 4689, Atlanta, GA 30302.
