New-age competition coming toward Gannett

As a newbie to the news business in 1962, nobody could ever tell me that people cherished their newspapers, in part, for the advertising therein. On the news side, we liked to believe that folks bought newspapers for the editorial content and suffered exposure to advertising because they had to.

It took me a long time to grow out of that simplistic theory, and to admit, finally, that advertising - especially classified advertising - is a major reason folks are interested in newspapers. Today, I always read certain of the classifieds and that is a major reason why I subscribe to the Advocate.

Meanwhile, Gannett has cornered the market on local print-media advertising. This has permitted it to raise the price of its advertising to such a level that I rarely use it anymore. It's just too expensive, except perhaps on high-priced items.

Back in the days when the Advocate was offering fair-priced classified (and display) ad prices, there was a brazen little up-start of a paper called "The Advertiser." I believe they offered a classified ad for $1, and then gave their paper away.

Advocate managers weren't so perceptive back then either, because by the time they woke up to the fact that this game-plan was brilliant, it was already too late: The Advertiser had a good part of the market share and was here to stay. Only within recent months did Advocate/Gannett decide to choke off the competition from The Advertiser by buying it.

Gannett community newspapers reported a whopping 18.4% decline in classified revenue from a year ago, according to a report 12/18/07 in Editor & Publisher.

There's no way (I know of) to learn about Gannett's local profitability, but likely Gannett is pricing itself out of the market everywhere, not just Newark. The higher go its prices, the more inspiration folks will have to do as I do and turn to Craigslist, knowing that even that small exposure to Newark readers is better than a broad, but prohibitively costly exposure in the Advocate.

There's some noteworthy new-age competition shaping up to take aim at Gannett: That would be a really good web site geared to Newark similar in concept to the Buysellcommunity.com Columbus branch site that offers free classifieds along with (presumably) low-cost display advertising, and local on-line stores.

All it takes is one ambitious, market-savvy promoter to set up a cheaper, more accessible marketplace for Licking County folks, just like The Advertiser did many years ago.

When this comes to town, all the Gannett horses and all the Gannett king's men will not put their ripped-off customer base back together again.