Originally published in Countryside Post, Issue 1.9.
If this issue seems to have a lot of ads, it’s ’cause it does. As you know, the reason you get Countryside Post free is because advertising pays for everything.
That’s the way newspapers work. Even the ones who take subscriptions work that way—in their case, subscriptions just pay for the cost of circulation. In the Post’s case, we eat that cost. That’s partly because I believe that news is free and should remain so—if you’re gonna call news-reporting "a public service," it’s not public if you charge for it—and because if you circulate to everyone, you’re not so dependent on circulation figures that you have to resort to harebrained schemes to increase circulation. Nor do you have to appeal to "the nobility of journalism" or being "the voice of the community" in order to get customers. That’s a load of bull dooky anyway, and we all know it. Advertisers want numbers, and if we circulate to everyone, we got ’em.
Now, why have I just exposed the oft-toted nobility of journalism as hog-wash? Partly because I don’t believe in snowing the public, and partly because I want you to understand why we want more advertising. I didn’t get into the news biz to sell ads, but that’s how you subsidize the news. I want the Post to get bigger. I want the Post to have more news in it. More ads mean more pages—which we’ll have next issue, thanks to our amazing ad staff—and more pages mean more news.
Hallelujah, more news. Want to contribute? Call me at 268-3420.
—Kent Leslie, managing editor
Update, 9/14/2009: This particular issue had so many ads in it, the Post was starting to look like the Foothill Trader. We had just added a salesperson to the staff, and we were sticking to an ads-to-news ratio that was meant to keep us in the black: We had to be at least 33.3 percent advertising. The Post was eight pages and we could add pages in four-page increments: an eight-page paper, a twelve-page paper, a sixteen-page paper, etc. At eight pages, on slow ad weeks, we could dip below 33.3 percent, though we didn’t want to—but no matter how few ads there were, we weren’t gonna produce a four-page paper. Anyway, that week we were probably scraping 60 percent ads, but it just didn’t justify adding four pages. So I had to hold off a few stories… and before we got complaints about it, I preemptively wrote a column.
The title is sort of a pun, but not a very good one. There were a lot of anti-growth folks in the area, only they didn’t call themselves that; they said they were against “urban sprawl” or that they were in favor of “managed growth” or “slow growth.” Basically, they had moved to the country, they had theirs, and they didn’t want anyone else getting any. And since the Post wasn’t growing in pages just yet, I decided to play with the “slow growth” idea… and it didn’t work. Nobody got it. But nobody complained, so there’s that.
While I was at it, I vented a bit about the tendency of newspapers to charge for their services. This came up ’cause I was getting a little frustrated at the time—I was doing some background research for a story, and figured I should be able to find out some details from The Union or the Auburn Journal’s websites. The Journal had nothing, and the Union at the time was only giving up information to subscribers. This was the early days of newspapers on the internet, and they didn’t yet understand the idea of free content, paid for by advertising. Of course, I did—that was exactly what we were doing with the Post.
Anyway, the only way I could get information was to go to the public library in Grass Valley, which meant a half hour to get there and a half hour back.
“News is supposed to be free, dammit,” I said to no one in particular, and started writing a column about it.
When I discovered mid-week that there wasn’t going to be a whole lot of room for stories, I had to write a new, shorter column. But I kept the main point of my previous rant and tucked it in what tiny space I had for it.
Sadly, our new ad salesperson didn’t stay on board too long past Christmas. Working for 15 percent commission isn’t a huge motivation to stick around, especially when three other newspapers are fighting you tooth and nail over the area’s advertising. More on that another time.