Tobacco Regulation Is Expected to Face a Free-Speech Challenge

The New York Times – The marketing and advertising restrictions in the tobacco law that Congress passed last week are likely to be challenged in court on free-speech grounds. But supporters of the legislation say they drafted the law carefully to comply with the First Amendment.

The law’s ban on outdoor advertising within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds would effectively outlaw legal advertising in many cities, critics of the prohibition said. And restricting stores and many forms of print advertising to black-and-white text, as the law specifies, would interfere with legitimate communication to adults, tobacco companies and advertising groups said in letters to Congress and interviews over the last week.

The controversy, legal experts say, involves tension between the right of tobacco companies to communicate with adult smokers and the public interest in preventing young people from smoking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/business/16tobacco.html

Opponents of the new strictures, including the Association of National Advertisers and the American Civil Liberties Union, predict that federal courts will throw out the new marketing restrictions. They say, for example, a 2001 Supreme Court decision struck down a Massachusetts rule that had imposed a similar ban on advertising within 1,000 feet of schools.

TV Audiences Falling Faster Than Newspapers

Newspapers sell fewer copies than they used to, and network television news draws fewer viewers. But as that trend unfolded, newspapers and television gave starkly different accounts, a University of Pennsylvania study released last week shows.

Papers found a lot to report about declining news audiences, while national television news shows had little to say. And though the problems of print and broadcast have been similar in scope, both media dwelled primarily on what was happening to newspapers.

“The television networks have basically not been very interested in talking about television’s problems,” said Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the university’s Annenberg School of Communication and one of the study’s authors. The authors combed through reports from 2000 through early 2009 from 26 major newspapers, the evening news broadcasts of ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS, and the prime-time lineups of CNN, CNBC, Fox News and MSNBC.

In the newspapers, they found 900 articles about the drop in newspaper circulation and 95 about the shrinking audience for the broadcast networks’ newscasts. The TV news shows had 38 reports on falling newspaper readership and only 6 about the falling audience for national news broadcasts.

(The broadcast networks’ evening news shows have lost audience more rapidly than printed newspapers, to about 23 million people each night now from 32 million in 2000. At the same time, the audience for prime-time cable news has roughly tripled, to about four million. Newspaper sales have dropped to about 47 million a day from 56 million in 2000. And all media have new — but not very lucrative — audiences online.)

Of the 26 newspapers studied, three — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post — accounted for almost half the articles about either newspaper circulation or broadcast national news ratings. On television, about half the reports came from two cable networks — CNBC and Fox.http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/business/media/11paper.html

Scripps Tries to Steer Local Ads to Paper’s Sites

The New York Times – KNOXVILLE, Tenn., is a place where residents root for the Vols, prefer their iced tea sweet and turn to the Knoxville News Sentinel for local coverage. The paper has been around since 1886, and it has entered the Internet age with a Web site featuring videos and blogs.

But central as The News Sentinel may be to the local community, it is not attracting local advertisers to its Web site. This is a problem that newspapers across the country are having. Local advertisers, though, are spending more and more money online — but it is mostly going to portals and stand-alone Web sites, not newspapers.

Local advertisers are expected to spend almost $12.9 billion online this year, almost five times what they spent in 2004, according to Borrell Associates, a firm that researches local media. But while newspaper sites received 44 percent of local Internet revenue in 2004, that figure dropped to 27 percent this year, according to Borrell.

Now, publications like The News Sentinel, which is part of the E. W. Scripps Company, A. H. Belo and McClatchy are revamping their online sales to capture local ads. Since so many things are hurting newspaper companies — like rising printing and distribution costs, credit troubles, decreasing circulation and plummeting print advertising — online growth is essential.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/business/media/03adcol.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Sex, France and Cliches

The New York Times -The posters displayed in Paris Métro stations show a slim woman in her 50s in a cocktail dress, reclining on a leather sofa. Her hair is natural, her makeup understated, her smile satisfied. In the foreground, a man, his torso nude, slips two 100-euro notes into his pocket.

The posters were advertising “Cliente,” a popular movie that revolves around clichés about prostitution and gigolos in France. Judith, the client, who is played by Nathalie Baye, one of France’s highest-paid actresses, is not a pathetic, lifted rich woman of a certain age and nothing to do. Rather, she is a hard-charging, 51-year-old television shopping-channel anchor and director who, after her marriage falls apart, wants good sex without strings and is willing to pay handsomely for it.

For Josiane Balasko, 58, the director, author and actress (she plays Judith’s sister), the goals were twofold: to shatter a long-held taboo in France and to send a positive message to middle-aged women who find themselves alone and wanting sexual fulfillment.

“Prostitution is the last sexual territory owned by men,” she said in an interview. “Men are in control of pleasure and have the right to buy it. Women do not. A lot of my friends are alone, lonely, divorced. They can’t always reinvent themselves with another man and a new family. So I decided to show a female client of a male escort. She’s not a victim. She is a woman who is in control of her life, her feelings, her sexual pleasure.”

Six years ago, Ms. Balasko could not sell the television screenplay. Its subject, she said, was considered “too raw, too hot.” After the book version became a best seller, it was easy to attract financial backing for a film.

“Cliente” comes at a moment when France is struggling with boundaries: the public portrayal of sex and sexuality, the limits of privacy for its public figures. This is the case, even though historically, the French are much less conflicted than Americans when it comes to sex. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/fashion/30cliente.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Condé Nast Cutting Five Percent of All Magazine Staffs

New York Observer – Call it the Five Percent Plan.

The Observer has learned that all Condé Nast publishers and editors have been told they have to cut their staffs by 5 percent and their budgets by 5 percent within weeks, according to five Condé Nast sources.

It will affect every title, including the company’s most successful: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, Glamour and down the line.

The plan is not just a 5 percent overall spending reduction but rather two distinct 5 percent cuts for each title, guaranteeing that titles cannot meet the goal without cutting staff.

First, each book will have to cut 5 percent of its payroll. They can do this through laying off staff or eliminating open and unfilled positions or a combination of the two.

Second, each book will have to cut 5 percent from its non-payroll budget lines: travel and expenses, meals, freelancers, etc.http://www.observer.com/2008/media/empty-nast-syndrome-conde-nast-cutting-5-percent-all-magazine-staffs-future-mens-vogue-do

Newark Star-Ledger Plans 40% Cut

The New York Times – The Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest newspaper, will cut its newsroom staff about 40 percent by year’s end, one of the largest reductions in a single move by a major American paper.

The paper will give buyouts to about 150 news employees who requested them, managers told employees on Friday, after years in which the paper resisted the broad newsroom cuts that have been become commonplace across a troubled industry. Advance Publications, owner of The Star-Ledger, has said the paper was on track to lose about $40 million this year as print advertising declines sharply.

Advance said in August that it needed at least 200 of the paper’s roughly 750 nonunion employees from many departments to leave through a voluntary buyout offer. Otherwise, it would sell the paper, the company said, and any new owner would probably resort to layoffs rather than buyouts.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/27/business/media/27paper.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Fox News Is Digging Deep to Field an All-Star Lineup

The New York Times – WITH the re-signing this week of Bill O’Reilly, the most successful host in cable news, to a four-year deal worth more than $10 million a year, the Fox News Channel is starting to resemble the New York Yankees.

The channel has sewn up a full lineup of politically outspoken heavy hitters, and the salaries have been eye-popping. Last November, Shepard Smith, the channel’s main news anchor, landed a deal worth a reported $8 million a year; earlier this month, Sean Hannity signed on with Fox News until 2012 in what was described as a multimillion-dollar deal. And the channel scored a coup when it lured another conservative voice, Glenn Beck, from CNN’s Headline News, with another multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract.

Now all Fox News has to do is pay for all that.

A chunk of that cash will be expected to come from advertising, and that’s where Fox might have some cause for worry. Not only is the television news business anticipating a falloff in ads after the intense surge that has accompanied the presidential election this year, but the stumbling national economy, which has pounded many reliable television advertisers — auto companies, for example — is now expected to cut deeply into ad revenue all over television in the next year.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/23/business/media/23adco.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Newspapers’ Web Revenue Is Stalling

The New York Times – Newspapers, already facing a grim economic forecast, are digesting another piece of bad news: the growth in online advertising they saw as their salvation has slowed to a crawl.

In the last few years, newspaper companies have been rapidly expanding their Web presence — adding blogs, photo slide shows and podcasts — in the belief that more features would bring more advertisers. But now, after 17 quarters of ballooning growth, online revenue at newspaper sites is falling. In the second quarter, it was down 2.4 percent compared with last year, to $777 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America. It was the only year-over-year drop since the group began measuring online revenue in 2003.

Overall online advertising, however, is strong. Display advertising, the graphics-rich ads that newspaper sites carry, grew 7.6 percent in the second quarter, TNS Media Intelligence reported.

Newspaper executives say the new features have drawn bigger, more engaged audiences, which they hope will translate to more advertisers. Unique readers in August were 17 percent higher than a year earlier, at 69.3 million, according to a Nielsen Online analysis of newspaper sites for the newspaper association. They also point to other factors for the decline, including the economic downturn and the continued flight of classified advertisers away from papers and their sites. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/business/media/13adco.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalin

Star-Ledger, LA TImes Face Deep Cuts

Two more large dailies will absorb significant staff reductions as the newspaper industry continues to downsize as revenues decline.

The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., on Tuesday neared completion of cost-cutting measures that will stave off a sale or closure of New Jersey’s largest newspaper. Meanwhile, Los Angeles Times employees were being told about likely staff reductions, the latest of several rounds of cuts at the paper since the start of the year.

The union representing the Star-Ledger’s truck drivers was expected late Tuesday night to ratify a new contract, an outcome that would fulfill the publisher’s third and final condition for survival beyond this year. In July the Newhouse family, which owns the Star-Ledger along with more than two dozen newspapers and the Condé Nast magazine company, said it would sell the paper unless it secured concessions from two unions and unless 200 people — more than a quarter of its nonunionized full-time staff — accepted buyouts.

The paper’s mailers’ union last month ratified a new agreement, and more than enough staffers have applied for the buyout. But just weeks ago the paper and its drivers’ union remained far apart on a new agreement, prompting George Arwady, publisher of the Star-Ledger, to say the paper might need to pursue a sale or close in January.

Another Magazine For The Rich – Will it Work?

Print may be in the doghouse, but advertisers wishing to reach an affluent audience still want to advertise in print publications. The high end market is still very profitable for print publications as evidenced by a long list of publications catering to these readers – Vanity Fair, Forbes, Portfolio and now a new magazine to be published by the Wall Street Journal. Is this more evidence of yet another publishing bubble? – MT

The New York Times – SELLING any print advertising these days means sailing against the wind, but as some categories battle a gale, the safest harbor is in ads for luxury consumer products.That is the theory behind WSJ., the new magazine from The Wall Street Journal, which was unveiled to reporters on Wednesday and will be delivered to many subscribers on Saturday.It joins an increasingly crowded field of magazines unabashedly celebrating wealth and consumption, all trying to take advantage of the healthiest part of a shrinking print advertising pool. And it is the latest in a series of bids by The Journal to capture a bigger piece of the consumer ad market and lessen its traditional dependence on ads aimed at businesses.http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bc7916de-7a0d-11dd-bb93-000077b07658.html
http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2008/03/27/the-luxury-magazine-bubble/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/business/media/04adco.html?ex=1378267200&en=0659c895144da481&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink