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Trashing the newspaper

What does today’s Sydney Morning Herald tell us about the state of the newspaper. As the photo below shows, the marketing department has succeeded in having their ad – for cheap home delivery – stuck on top of the masthead, obscuring the Sydney in the title.

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I was shocked when I saw this when I arrived here this morning. At least the folks at The Age stick their ads over editorial, not the actual masthead itself. Journalists I correspond with in the US tell me they would bring on industrial action if their publisher permitted such an attack on the brand.

While I am no marketing expert, I would have thought that covering your brand in this way is a bad move.

On the home delivery offer itself, I doubt newsagents will be happy – they make less from a home delivery sale than retail from the product itself and add on sales through retail. A smart publisher would develop an incentive program with retailers so they can drive single copy sales.  This is fertile ground yet of little interest to some publishers as they don;t have the same control they have through home delivery.

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newspaper masthead desecration

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