RJ Rate Increase (imagine that)

Posted on September 27, 2007
Filed Under Advertising Mistakes |

Las Vegas employers recently received a letter from Bob Brown, Director of Advertising, Las Vegas Review Journal. The letter didn’t directly state that there was an advertising rate increase; it simply stated that new rates will be effective October 1, 2007. Well, anyone who has received correspondence from the RJ before knows that they would never decrease their rates. (Read the letter here).

It still amazes me - daily newspaper readership is on the decline. Advertising in the classified (help-wanted) is on the decline. Yet - the newspaper continues to raise its rates.

According to the letter, Mr. Brown believes that broadcast media is what is impacting their readership as he attempts to rationalize that “it takes 40 top radio spots or 8 top prime time television spots to rival one Sunday advertisement’ in the newspaper. Hmmmm…. That doesn’t seem to make sense.

He obviously uses the 2.5 readers per newspaper metric as he claims the RJ has 542,000 unique readers when their audited circulation is clearly less than that.

What he neglects to share is the fact that very few readers actually read the entire newspaper. As a matter of fact, surveys have shown that fewer than 20% even look at the classified section, and less than that are going there to look for a job.

But don’t worry…. According to the letter ….. it’s the newspapers ‘mission’ to bring quality journalism to Las Vegas. I guess that is why they recently canned all but two of their writers for the Las Vegas Business Press, the last niche product of any value they had.