IF RESTAURANTS RAN LIKE COLLEGE PAPERS, DINERS WOULD STARVE TO DEATH

Want to advertise in your college newspaper? It’s probably a pain in the ass.

Last month, I mocked a hashtag called #SaveStudentNewsrooms. It was a one-day campaign to highlight the financial struggles of today’s college newspapers. Really, though, it was just a bunch of students bragging about their self-importance and begging for donations.

I pitched another idea to #SaveStudentNewsrooms organizers: I’ll send advertising experts to your campus, so they can train you to sell more ads and make more money. Their millennial response can be distilled to this…

Why do we have to WORK for the money? Why can’t you just give it to us?

A little pissed off, I reviewed all 130 websites from the hashtag’s “participating newsrooms.” Turns out they’re not selling enough ads because they don’t seem to give a crap about selling ads.

For example…

Out of patience

Want to advertise in The Alligator at the University of Florida? It’s one of the largest college papers in the country, and one of the stupidest for buying an ad…

Go to the website.
Click on Advertising.
Click on Rate Cards.
Click on General Rates
Download the PDF.

I can buy a car easier than that. Seriously, it takes four clicks to price out a Mustang at Ford.com.

By the way, the PDF looks like this…

Can you imagine a restaurant with a menu like that? Speaking of restaurants, how do you call for takeout if you can’t find a phone number?

Out of order

Click on Advertise for Columbia Chronicle, and you get this…

Click on Business Department for The Daily Campus at UConn, and you get, “We couldn’t find the page you were looking for.” Click on Advertise for Northwestern’s paper, and you get nothing.

Out of sight

If you can find any advertising information at all on Arkansas Tech’s Arka Tech or Queens University’s Queens Chronicle, I’ll give you a cookie.

Out of sync

UCLA’s Daily Bruin offers no ad details online – from rates to sizes to circulation. You need to call or email “to get your plan started today.”

Before the millennium, that’s how advertising worked. You didn’t want competing media to know your prices, then undercut you by a dollar.

But it’s 2018, and if you can compare home prices online, you certainly expect to know what a college newspaper charges for an ad. You’d think bleeding-edge college students would realize this.

Out of time

College newspapers may indeed be dying, but so would a restaurant that refuses to reveal its prices unless you called first, or makes you download a PDF of the menu, or forgets to include a menu, or has a broken link to its menu.

Three more things…

First, these are just some examples from the 130 papers I reviewed. There were so many others, it would be ponderous to link to them all.

Second, these papers signed up for a hashtag campaign because they’re keenly aware of their own fiscal mortality. Imagine all the others who don’t see it coming.

Third, while I’m still offering to send ad experts to their campuses, I wonder if that will even help. How do you save a newspaper – or a restaurant – that isn’t even trying?

5Comments

Add yours

1

a possible explanation on May 30, 2018 at 12:56 pm

For schools not on quarters, this is summer break. The problems you point out might be a result of that.
2

Claire Meirowitz on Jun 1, 2018 at 8:35 am

Probably the student editors and their advertising managers don’t see the connection between sellings ads and publishing a newspaper. Chances are the paper is being published out of (some) college funds and/or has access to free (college) offices.
3

Scott Berson on Jun 1, 2018 at 12:41 pm

This is true. Our paper was funded by student fees and we had little incentive to sell ads. They were an afterthought to an afterthought. We had one ad rep, sometimes, if we could get one, and if not, we didn’t care.
4

Karen Eckel Bridgeman on Jun 3, 2018 at 2:32 pm

Back when God was a boy and I was working on high school and college papers (really, the late 60s and early 70s), we had folks interested in the news side and folks interested in the sales side. Our advisor led both staff groups, our instructors taught both sides of the house (and made sure we understood the walls between them), and our team included reporters and sales people. There weren’t a lot of kids involved in both the news and ad sides, but there were some.

Reporting and ad sales definitely require different skill sets, and certainly different interests drive them, but the problem being described sounds like a failure of leadership and instruction. When did the “publisher” — the school — decide business matters weren’t part of the equation?! When did the ad side of the house decide it didn’t have a role?!
5

Chris Richert / Paul Bittick on Jun 4, 2018 at 12:46 pm

Why is it important to sell you publications in the summer? Here are the reasons we believe it is so important:

Your student staff don’t have the normal class conflicts and can spend more time getting to know the customer and educating them on the value of your products.

Traditionally, Freshmen orientation, advising, move in, etc. and back-to-school editions are or at least they should be your biggest selling products each year. We have four editions that account for about 30-35 percent of our total revenue each year.

Businesses like to plan out their advertising for more than just one edition or a month or a two. They would rather plan for the entire year and doing this in the summer really makes a lot of sense.

If you wait to start selling your regular editions until school starts, you are constantly playing catch-up the rest of the year. Selling contacts for the fall semester/quarter or for the school year only happens in the summer.