The future of newspaper publishing?

Print journalism is a dying art. I am sure in the next decade or so, it will almost become extinct. Thanks to technologies like the internet and devices that can read newspapers, the newspaper publishing industry is taking a huge hit.

In Oregon, The Oregonian is a newspaper that has a circulation of around 700,000 people. It also features something that not a lot of other papers feature. It has an advertising sleeve that covers up half of the front page of the paper. It’s not only limited to the newspaper, but also the internet site as advertisers buy up the spaces to get their message thrown into the faces of readers.

The newspaper is just trying something new because obviously it has to do something to combat the number of people dropping their subscriptions to newspapers all across the country. Figures show that newspaper circulation is down 7% and advertisers are pulling out at an even more dramatic rate. Ad revenue for newspapers is down nearly 30%.

The Oregonian seems to think this is the future of print advertising. Here are two probable difficulties with this belief:
1. It’s annoying. Seriously, who wants to pull of an insert to see the full front page?
2. It’s eye-catching, for now. One year from now it will be just as old as regular newspaper ads.

The ad space for the newspaper is available for every edition of the paper. This paper is a daily, so for a price you could have your ad splattered across the front page of the paper for seven days. The newspaper says that the ads are “impossible to miss, front-page positioning with full-page merchandising.”

I think that newspapers should do whatever they need to do to stay in business. Last night Chris and I ate at a restaurant that had old newspapers laminated and set below the table cloths in a way that you could read the headlines from 1934. It was really interesting and I would hate to think in 70 years that someone wouldn’t be able to think the same thing.

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