Kris Oser describes (Subscription – Ad Age) the influence between advertising and media content:

Is it safe to advertise in places on the Internet that are essentially run by consumers and cannot be controlled? How can they protect themselves and their good names when blog and chat-room users are liable to say and post anything? It’s not just pornography or off-color language that worries them. What if consumers got angry about something involving a marketer’s brand, and their remarks got linked to across the Internet? Maybe advertising in such open spaces is not worth the risk.

emphasis added Dave Winer and Doc Searls offer useful comments.

Sandy Cullen takes an interesting look at local government, and perhaps public education’s willingness to support advertising. Advertising is everywhere and will be more so in the future. One of the reasons for this is the ongoing fragmentation of media. The internet provides many, many options for local, regional, national and international news, weather, sports and arts information.

Advertising is simply following eyeballs.

I have some other candidates for advertising:

• Kenton Peters’ Blue Federal Courthouse and the WARF building – advertising can only help these eyesores
• Camp Randall and the Kohl Center’s exteriors. I think we have enough grey, certainly during our winter months
• The City/County Building, East Berlin architecture, circa 1960’s at its best.

Cullen interviewed a number of local advertising firms, but not the largest – her own publisher, Capital Newspapers. Capital (SEC 10-Q) reported six months revenue (through March 31, 2005) of $60,225K and operating income of 14,081K (23%!)

In an effort to connect with teenagers, The Gannett owned Green Bay Press Gazette is looking for teen bloggers. I can see the Press-Gazette’s benefits (advertising), but what’s in it for the teens? Blogging software and domains are extremely cheap, if not free these days. Mark Deuze’s paper on Participatory Journalism is surely related. I’m not sure that the cathedral of newpapers is where it will happen, however.

We are using more media than ever before in history, yet this intensive engagement with media does not translate into more attention paid to the stories told by the two archetypical media professions: journalism and advertising”

(Click the photo for a larger version)

I walked to the bottom of my driveway early this morning to grab the NY Times (I still get the fishwrap version) and saw that another paper was dropped off (the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the Wisconsin State Journal periodically drop promotional copies around the neighborhood).
The 2nd paper was rather interesting: the first two pages were advertising “Brought to you by Middleton Ford”. Perhaps this advertiser bought x number of copies that were dropped around the area? Most interestingly, the advertiser pages completely covered the Wisconsin State Journal. From the advertiser perspective, it is certainly in your face for those who take the paper out of the bag (why not direct mail?). From the State Journal’s perspective, however, it is a big dilution of the brand. Promo copies (try us) are one thing, but a promo copy completely wrapped in an ad is another.
This approach is identical to traditional advertiser only publications. Perhaps that’s where the daily papers will end up: free to all readers, but with a much larger and more invasive ad presence.
Meanwhile, Joseph T. Hallinan covers McClatchy’s circulation woes at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Finally, I took a look at local coverage/links to today’s very unfortunate London events around 7:00a.m. at two popular local news sites, Capital Newspapers’ madison.com site and Morgan Murphy Media’s channel3000.com. At 6:48a.m., channel3000 had a photo of British PM Tony Blair’s press conference along with a story and links. madison.com did not mention this breaking story (they later posted a link to an AP story on the London bombing). (click to view a screen shot of the two sites at 6:48a.m. today). The internet’s news cycle is clearly different than the traditional paper’s 24 hour process.

Having said all that, I think the local sites are much better off 99% focused on local issues. There was and is no shortage of coverage on the London events around the net.

Jay Rosen does quite a job connecting the advertising, authority/credibility and newspaper circulation dots between LA, Northern Virginia, Milwaukee and Dallas. Hugh Hewitt’s speech on circulation and advertising is well worth reading. Check it out.

Here’s a copy of the actual complaint (32K PDF)

Somewhat related, the Wisconsin State Journal (AP & WSJ Staff), while covering the Milwaukee Journal circulation lawsuit, mentions that “March 31, 2004, indicates that “other paid sales” accounted for 4.3 percent of the papers’ combined daily circulation and 1.5 percent of Sunday circulation.”

We live in interesting times.

Shorewest sues Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel over circulation inflation.

George Will:

The circulation of daily U.S. newspapers is 55.2 million, down from 62.3 million in 1990. The percentages of adults who say they read a paper “yesterday” are ominous:

• 65 and older — 60 percent.
• 50-64 — 52 percent.
• 30-49 — 39 percent.
• 18-29 — 23 percent

Americans ages 8 to 18 spend an average of 6 hours and 21 minutes a day with media of all sorts but just 43 minutes with print media.

The combined viewership of the network evening newscasts is 28.8 million, down from 52.1 million in 1980. The median age of viewers is 60. Hence the sponsorship of news programming by Metamucil and Fixodent. Perhaps we are entering what David T.Z. Mindich, formerly of CNN, calls “a post-journalism age.”