Well, we'd simply taken enough and weren't going to stand by as spectators any longer. We had to stand up for our brothers of the journalistic profession who toil in the traditional print media. It's been a rough slog the past few years, and the numbers last November were more dismal than ever. People just aren't buying papers like they used to, and just as Obi Wan felt disturbances in The Force, with each cancelled subscription we feel a similar tear in the fabric of traditional America.
Here at Also Also, we understand the costs of running a sound, high quality news operation. We suffer the same economic cruelties and realities. We've seen our costs for printer's ink skyrocket. Our distribution network is eating up diesel fuel like nobody's business. And trying to make payroll for the city room has been a week-to-week affair. Times are tough everywhere, and we feel your pain.
It's no secret that papers live and die on circulation, because papers live and die on ad revenue and ad rates are set by circulation. Meier and Frank isn't going to pay as much for their absurdly huge ad buys if everyone's off reading the online version (although The O is a bad example, what with LiveOregon being an award-winningly poor newsweb). But here's the real secret: what's killing papers isn't ad buys for the news pages; it's the classifieds.
We're not EBay, so we can't help them there. But what we can do, in the spirit of worker unity, is pick up the slack and represent the traditional print media to the adbuying community. We can say, "We* accept this ad buy to Also Also in the name of our brothers at The Oregonian, who cannot sell this ad themselves! There is POWER in a union!"
And so we have. At the behest of a small man in a camelhair coat who slipped us 100,000 pesos and the HTML script to show the text, Also Also have joined the Oregon Progressives Ad Network. As a member of this prestigious network of Oregon blogs, we'll stand firm with print media, and accept the ads they aren't able to. We'll take the revenue on their behalf, and continue to plow those monies right back into our efforts to support them even more.
Making her committment with us in our rally for print dinosaurs, is Senator Hillary Clinton. She's speaking in Portland on the 27th, and if there was $50 you had no intention of using, and you think a wartalking hypercentrist polarizer who seems content to let George Bush walk all over the country is a good person to succeed him, head on out! And in so doing, know that your patronage as the result of our ad is a message to the Internet news bullies: we won't take your invasion of our cushy, centuries old domination of news delivery lightly!
Oregon Progressive blogads. Here at Also Also, we like to think of them simply as print media's foster kids. We know print will get off the jingoistic juice of this administration at some point, and when they've sobered up and gotten themselves back together, we'll be happy to turn that ad revenue back to its rightful owners. Just as soon as the results from the urine and hair testing come back.
--TJ
*I'm sure when Zap gets back we can talk about it then...
"camelhair coat" ?!
Posted by: Kari Chisholm | January 17, 2006 at 08:01
It might just have been suede. But we were still impressed.
Posted by: torridjoe | January 17, 2006 at 08:44