The New York Times reported a
possible affair by presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain
(R-NV), but the allegations against McCain appear to be thin at best. While the
politics of the claim are being covered in the media, a boycott of the New York
Times has been called because of the report, and that is Boycott Watch's venue.
This would not be the first time the New York Times
has been boycotted over accuracy of its reporting. The paper has been the
target of several boycott calls for an anti-Israel bias over the years. One
regular NYT boycotter is Herb Denenberg of the website Denenberg's Dump, a poignant blogger who has also called for
the boycott of other newspapers for the same anti-Israel bias. The question at
hand is if boycotts against newspapers work.
Before
answering that question, one first needs to understand newspapers today verses
twenty and even sixty years ago. Before Cable TV, newspapers were the news
kings, reporting the details that were left out of the half-hour nightly
national newscasts by the broadcast networks. What actually gets printed in
newspapers these days is driven by the Internet reporting of those same
newspapers, but not that much has changed. Newspapers used to break news when
the "extra" edition was sold by paperboys on street corners. Today's breaking
news stories are broken on the Internet by the very same newspapers. The only
real difference is instead of printing advertisements; you see them on your
computer screen.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer is
typical of major newspapers, as they produce stories for the Internet;
including using their own video crews for their website, thus competing with
local television newscasts. The Plain Dealer, like most newspapers, has a 4PM
meeting to decide which Internet posted stories will actually get in their only
daily print edition. In many cases, the Internet stories are more detailed than
the printed story because of space constraints. This may also explain why
newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal charge for their online versions -
not having to pay for physical printing allows more content to be disseminated
at a lower cost, and at the same time it creates an added value for that
service.
Most newspapers allow free access to their
online edition by instead making money from online advertisers. The question
for a newspaper is will they generate more money from the collective pennies
per page views, or can they get a larger subscription fee from each reader
despite a limited readership. Considering the fact that online advertisers may
pay as little as $5.00 per 1,000 ad impressions, the answer depends on one
website statistic: pages per visitor. Publications with a large readership but
low page displays are better off with subscription fees, especially if your ads
are not targeted, which is hard to accomplish when you don't know your readers
because few page displays mean limited to no browser cookie data mining.
Targeted Internet ads are based on data mining, resulting in far more money per
ad impression than general hit-or-miss ads. In fact, some campaigns can be
targeted to people working within one particular building but could also be
relatively expensive.
These factors are critical in
a newspaper boycott. The fact is that newspapers, especially the print
versions, are very sensitive to boycotts because of the high initial and fixed
costs per print run. A very strong newspaper boycott resulting in a 5%
distribution drop can result in a dramatic revenue drop because of thin
margins.
In the case of the previous Israel related
newspaper boycotts, people have made phone calls to drop the newspaper which
have been noticed by management, but the volume of calls is unknown. In 2002,
Boycott Watch reported a boycott by pro-Israel groups against the
Philadelphia
Inquirer in which we simply posted the boycotters complaint and the
response by the Philadelphia Inquirer which answered all of the boycotters
issues.
Newspaper readers tend to be creatures of
habit. They read the newspapers they love, and usually in the same order every
day, be it sports, the comics or the front page first. As such, newspaper
boycotts are hard to establish unless the newspaper does something totally
outrageous, which brings us back to the New York Times boycott call over the
report about McCain.
The boycott call was made on
Your World with Neil Cavuto on the Fox News Channel, were former NYT reporter
Mr. JP Freire, but there is a problem - Republicans generally don't read the
NYT anyhow, so that boycott simply won't go far. If, however, such a story
would have been about Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama, such a boycott would have
worked because even if a very small percentage of actual NYT readers would be
willing to break their habits, the total volume of boycotters would be enough
to impact publishing revenues.
Still, McCain
supporters probably don't read the NYT anyhow, which Freire even stated, which
makes the boycott somewhat moot. To top it off, when Cavuto asked Freire if his
boycott would target NYT advertisers, Freire backed down. As such, the
boycotter did not take his own boycott call seriously and even if he did,
consumer trends indicate this boycott is not going to be effective. |
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