QuadrantOne - CBS - Nielsen - Google - Reveille - MediaBytes February 15, 2008

Comments

• anonymous February 17th, 2008 1:07 pm

  If your school is approached by the Gannett/USA Today Collegiate
  Readership Program, I hope that you will consider this: They want
  to steal your college newspaper advertisers! They will financially
  beat your college newspaper down by drastically reducing your ad
  revenue so that they can either take over your college newspaper if
  it has potential for profit or simply put it out of business. The
  USA Today Collegiate Readership Program has been cleverly marketed
  to colleges and universities across the country as a way to
  enlighten our students and improve the journalism skills of the
  campus newspaper writers. On Feb. 15, 2008 a joint initiative
  called Quadrantone was announced by Gannett, The Tribune
  Newspapers, Hearst Corp and the New York Times. This program
  creates an unprecedented on line advertising platform that will
  allow this newly formed oligopoly to offer localized on line
  advertising on their member online newspaper websites to local
  advertisers who have relied on the college newspaper to reach
  students. With Quadrantone, even the on line editorial content can
  be customized to reach different demographic groups. Here is the
  bottom line- This USA Today program is nothing more than a
  surreptitious way to curry favor with students and administrators
  under the guise of providing a valuable educational service to our
  community. Make no mistake about it. The goal of the USA Today
  readership program is not to enlighten our students and broaden
  their perspectives as they would have you believe. Their sneaky
  plan involves bringing USA Today and usually the New York Times on
  campus along with the local metropolitan newspaper (usually a
  Gannett publication)- often “free of charge” to the students but
  paid for by the college administration or student government
  association. That way the program can count all of their newspapers
  on campus as paid circulation to justify ad rate increases. The
  typical metropolitan newspaper is written on an 8th grade reading
  level. Is that the kind of education and enlightenment that our
  students can look forward too? Once the USA Today Collegiate
  Readership program gets the local metropolitan newspaper on the
  college campuses, their goal is to steal college newspaper
  advertisers by offering below market display ad rates to local
  advertisers and below market on line ad rates through the
  Quadrantone platform. Gannett and the other large newspaper
  conglomerates share a common goal- put the college newspapers out
  of business or buy them for a fraction of what they are worth. Why
  are they doing this? The average age of today’s metropolitan
  newspaper reader is 56 years old! The newspaper industry has the
  same dilemma as the tobacco industry. Their older customers are
  hooked but the new generation is not buying. When today’s readers
  die, so goes their readership. Therefore, to survive, Gannett and
  the other Quadrantone members are aggressively trying to establish
  a foothold on college campuses. A few days after the local
  metropolitan paper and the two national papers are made available
  for free in nice shiny racks on the college campus, the multitude
  of ad reps for the local metropolitan paper and Quadrantone will be
  calling on every local business within a 10-mile radius of the
  campus and they will of course call EVERY national advertiser that
  has used the local college paper in the last 5 years. They will
  offer the college newspaper advertiser a display ad rate so low
  that the advertiser will jump ship. Now that Quadrantone can offer
  locally targeted online advertising, the college newspapers that
  have local online advertising revenue will no longer be able to
  compete. “Citizen Kane” is often considered by movie critics to be
  the best >movie EVER PRODUCED. “Citizen Kane” is a 1941
  mystery/drama film. Released by RKO Pictures, it was the first
  feature film directed by Orson Welles. The story traces the life
  and career of Charles Foster Kane, a man whose career in the
  publishing world is born of idealistic social service, but
  gradually evolves into a ruthless pursuit of power.”- Wikipedia It
  supposedly centers around the life of William Randolph Hearst, the
  undisputed giant in the newspaper industry in the early 1900’s. He
  tried everything he could to ban the movie from reaching the
  theaters and almost succeeded. If you want to see what corporate
  greed in the newspaper industry looks like, watch the movie. But
  don’t worry. When all looks lost, Gannett or some other newspaper
  giant might come to the rescue and buy out your college newspaper
  if it has the potential for profit. If not, they will just kill it
  by practically giving away their ads to the college market
  advertisers. If the college paper gets bought out, the students
  that are left now work for a huge multimedia conglomerate, and they
  can kiss goodbye the editorial freedom they have taken for granted.
  If the students start working for Gannett, they better not say
  something that Gannett does not agree with in the college paper,
  especially when it comes to politics. Study Gannett’s political
  mindset and commit it to memory or risk being shown the door.
  Gannett knows how the game is played. Gannett has already bought an
  independent college newspaper in Florida and is about to buy
  another student newspaper in Colorado. This is just the beginning.
  The alarming fact is that the USA Today Collegiate Readership
  Program marketers have duped students and their administrators into
  thinking that their motives are purely altruistic. That should
  insult the collective intelligence of our future leaders. The
  student newspaper, the last bastion of true freedom of expression
  in the print media, is slowly being destroyed by a modern day
  Citizen Kane.