In the mailbox this morning:
Discover the IMPROVED INQUIRER! If you haven’t seen The Inquirer in a while, it’s time to look again. Because there’s a better Inquirer, and improved Inquirer, now with MORE YOU.
There’s already enough of me, I think. In fact, there could stand to be about 50 pounds less of me. I don’t want more me in my newspaper, but I’d really like one that presents local news in a balanced fashion, and isn’t just a mouthpiece for the establishment left. So until they apologize for that, instead of saying “MORE YOU,” I’ll continue monitoring other sources.
Seriously, that has to be the dumbest marketing campaign I’ve ever seen. I hope they didn’t pay too much for someone to come up with the MORE YOU campaign. If so, I’d want my money back.
This reminds me of Time’s effort to be relevant that reaches desperation levels. I feel like I should change my Twitter tagline to report that I was Time’s Person of the Year for 2011, 2006, 2005, and 1975. It’s all the proof I need that I’m important!
Newspapers are desperate. They’ve lost anyone under 40 years old, and those they do sell papers to are dying off faster then they can add new subscribers. I really don’t understand why anyone would advertise in a daily. The ads are expensive and ineffective.
I’m mostly a dinosaur when it comes to news consumption so I likely will continue to subscribe to the Inky until either I or it dies (at this point, it looks like I might outlive the paper, which I never would have imagined). Putting aside the paper’s editorial bias (the lefty spin is pretty much a given with any big city paper), watching the steady decline of the news side of the paper has been akin to watching a once-vibrant relative (who you disagree with politically) succumb to cancer. The depth, breadth, and quality of reporting continues to sink – from the size of the “news hole” (how much stuff gets in the paper each day) to the decimation of national, regional and local coverage and its replacement with wire service blurbs, to the elimination of entire sections (anyone else remember when the paper used to run an entire weekly section on books?), the paper is on a never-ending downward spiral. Regardless of my differing political views from the Inky editorial board, to me this is a civic tragedy – as bad as the coverage gets, can you imagine what our gov officials would get away with without ANY newspaper reporters poking around? I admit I have a bias of my own – I was a reporter and editor (not at the Inky) for more than 15 years and I have several friends who are still in the business – but I dread the day the paper finally shuts it doors.
Anyway, you are absolutely correct that the current advertising campaign is horrible. There’s nothing “improved” about the current Inquirer, and certaintly not more of anything, much less “more you,” whatever that means.