Anyone attending the next meeting internally at Fairfax where they are discussing the decline in single copy sales, present this photo. While News Corp. is relying on news to drive impulse purchase Fairfax has sold the front page as an ad billboard. Sure the ad may make more money today, does it hinder newspaper sales?
We remove similar “front page” from every copy of The Sun Herald today, and help Fairfax sell more newspaper. While we were at it, we also removed the flyer inside offering half-price something.
The real question that Fairfax, News and the other newspaper publishers need to answer is whether they are producing newspapers with the goal to sell more newspapers (in which case the headlines and front page stories and stuff are the most important) or to get more money from advertisers (in which case sticking post-it-note ads on the front page or increasing the amount of front page space devoted to ads is the way to go)