HIGH-PRESSURE FRONT?

posted by James Reel

    The New Yorker’s usually astute Alex Ross, bemoaning newspaper cuts in classical-music coverage, mistakenly attributes the decline to the malignant influence of advertisers. This takes off from a question he posed about newspapers possibly losing revenue by giving away their content online:

Several people wrote in to point out that newspapers make their money not from subscriptions but from advertising—so that putting content on the Internet actually multiplies the opportunities for profit. OK, but should newspapers be so dependent on advertisers for their livelihood? What happens is that they answer to the tastes of advertisers rather than readers. This is why classical criticism and arts coverage are being cut back even as core subscribers remain loyal to that kind of writing. The advertisers don't like classical music because it generally doesn't appeal to their coveted young-male demographic.

    Well, maybe small-town newspaper editors can be bullied by advertisers, because there are so few businesses available to buy ads in Podunk, USA. And the content of many magazines, including some to which I contribute, is certainly guided to varying degrees by advertising. But as someone who has toiled many years in print journalism, as a reporter and an editor, I can assure Alex Ross that advertisers exert virtually no pressure in most midsize to large newsrooms. Oh, they complain, and they’ll be listened to politely, but I have never encountered an instance of an advertiser influencing coverage, or the lack of it. Indeed, when I was the editor of the Tucson Weekly, I was particularly hard-nosed about not letting restaurant owners, for example, influence coverage of their establishments, though many of them tried.
    Now, if a newspaper planned to put out a special section devoted to classical music and nobody advertised, the section would be killed and the blame could legitimately be placed on the non-advertisers. (Although really it should fall upon the paper’s sales staff. Exmple: It took years for TNI’s revolving-door sales team to figure out how to sell the Arizona Daily Star’s Sunday television supplement, which is exactly the sort of thing that should have businesses begging to advertise in. The low ad count was the fault of a poor sales effort.) But I’d like to know what advertiser is going to shun a newspaper because of the occasional music review or feature.