All the News that’s Fit to Hide
Yesterday (Sunday) the paper was expected to be one of the biggest of the year, and it did not disappoint. We use the term paper advisedly, because calling it a “newspaper” would be a stretch. If it were a food product they’d have to call it a “news flavored” paper product.
Reading the Sunday paper is a ritual that begins with a clerical exercise, sorting the various components into two stacks. All of the news, editorial, and feature sections are located and put in one stack for reading. In the other stack go all the advertising sections and inserts, and that stack will sit around on a chair for a few days just in case we need a pizza coupon.
Yesterday the sorting job seemed to take a lot longer than usual, so we decided to perform a scientific analysis. We weighed the two sorted stacks.
The entire paper, in its original weatherproof condom, weighed four pounds and five ounces. The plastic bag, originally intended to protect a newspaper from rain and snow, is now used every day because what is being delivered is not a newspaper but a stack of assorted printed materials that would scatter all over the driveway if not somehow contained.
The Reading Stack, consisting of every single section that was not devoted purely to advertising, weighed one pound four ounces.
The Ad Stack, consisting of all of the inserts, the two real estate sections, and the two car sections, weighed three pounds one ounce.
In other words, our four and half pound “newspaper” consisted of:
29% News, and
71% Ads. By weight.
But wait, there’s more! More ads, that is. The proportion of space (or column inches as we call it in the trade) devoted to advertising in the news sections was about 2 to 1 overall. What made us start looking was the “Second A” section, theoretically part two of the most important section of the paper. Beginning on page 3 we encountered three continuous pages with not a scrap of editorial material on them– three full pages of ads.
Well, if it were a newspaper, you wouldn’t be able to get the Sunday paper at the grocery store on Saturday morning. In ye olden tymes, newspapers would routinely publish four or five editions, with later news in each one, to meet the requirements of varying deadlines. The “early” was first, in time to hit the all-night newstands for shift-workers and the after-theater crowd. Then came the “out of town” edition, which had to get to the Post Office before midnight, and the “country” or “suburban” editions that had to get to the train station. Last was the “late” or “final” or “metro” edition that got delivered to your door, and to vending machines and kiosks in time for the morning commute.
It would be great if you could order the “out of town” edition. If it is going to be mailed at the heavily discounted periodical postage rate, it cannot contain less than 25% editorial or non-advertising content!
“All the news that’s fit to print” was once the motto of a great daily. Mad Magazine parodied it as “All the news that fits, we print.” Today it’s more like “As little news as we can get away with.”
But seriously, folks, it’s no wonder people don’t read newspapers much these days. TV “journalism” is more timely, faster paced, more entertaining, and has even less informational content. As bad as the newspaper is, if you spend a half-hour reading it you will absorb about ten times as much news as you could get from a TV news show.
Used to be the sale of ads was what made the publication of news possible, but the servant has become the master.
-30-
–SG
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