Tips to boost newspaper sales

Tips to boost newspaper sales

If you’re reading this, I hope you bought it at a newsstand and didn’t just pick it up off the bathroom floor at a fast food joint.

You see, newspapers are in a bit of a tight right now. Our readership is getting older and dying off and we’re having trouble selling news tailored to a younger market without alienating the readers we already have.

The Internet provides instant access to information and blogs allow citizen journalists the chance to get in the game. It’s giving us a run for our money, and if you’ve ever seen the staff of your average newsroom, you’d know that the only race they’d be likely to win would be on a downhill slope against a three-legged turtle.

It’s not too late for the business, if we’re willing to take the steps most industries take when faced with declining returns — sacrificing quality, ethics and decency. Here are a few suggestions.

Lace the ink: Is finding a five-letter word for senseless really that important or have you been absorbing crack through your fingertips? We’ll never tell.

Divorce announcements: By focusing only on weddings or engagements we’re leaving a vital market untapped. Many people who are splitting up would love to leave parting shots in the paper such as:

“John announces the dissolution of his union with Jane, whose idea of monogamy was one person per night,” or, “After 40 years of cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and enduring various bad smells, Mildred will be leaving Artie to do the dishes his damn self from now on.”

Pet obits: We live in a culture of misplaced sentimentality. Go to any movie theatre and you can see 12 people blown to smithereens onscreen without the audience batting an eye. However, if Benji gets hit by a car people will gasp, cry and even walk out of the theatre.

Newspapers can take advantage of this by offering pet obituaries. For a modest fee of $3 per line the paper can offer bereaved pet owners a way to memorialize their fallen furry friends in print. Most of them would probably read like this:

“Sparky went to play fetch with the Lord Thursday. He leaves behind sire Rolf, dam Pooky, three ladyfriends, 22 children, 144 grandpuppies, many friends and a very happy postman.”

The best thing about pet obits is that during a financial dry spell we can always drum up business by encouraging our carriers to drive faster in residential neighborhoods.

Boost the economy: Some of newspapers’ money problems are our own doing.

Our economy runs on information and belief. For example, when commodities traders hear about unrest in the Middle East or hurricanes threatening offshore oil rigs, they panic and the price of oil skyrockets, causing transportation costs to go up for businesses and the average citizen.

Chances are that if the economy is good, companies will have more money to spend on advertising and people will have more money to spend on newspapers. Therefore, if we want everyone to have more money all we have to do is make up a few positive financial headlines such as, “Factories Leave Mexico For U.S.” or “Jews, Arabs Join Hands, Start a Love Train” or “FDA Says Big Mac A Day Keeps Heart Disease Away.”

Print our own money: We’ve got the presses and the ink, why not?

Stalking services: Newspapers have ginormous lists of addresses and telephone numbers.


Judging from police reports and the vast library of Lifetime movies about stalking, there are lots of people who would love to have access to these records. Newspapers could turn a tidy profit by selling ex-husbands, psycho girlfriends and creepy drugstore workers’ phone numbers and addresses.

For an additional fee, we could even do our customers stalking for them. Our staff of talented writers could compose crazy notes to the stalkee, customer service reps could call and hang up every five minutes and carriers could make late-night drive-bys.

The fact is that newspapers have been pronounced dead more times than Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey’s marriage. Radio was supposed to kill the print media star but didn’t.

Television should have been our bane, but has instead just given us funny hairdos to laugh at.

We’ve survived all these changes and we’ll survive the Internet and bloggers. All we have to do is view the new technology and citizen journalists as resources and embrace the opportunities provided to us.

And besides, without newspapers what are you going to wrap your fish in and who will politicians, preachers and talk radio have to blame for everything that’s wrong with America?

This classic Jim Cook column was originally printed in 2005. If you’re wondering how a column that’s only two years old can be considered a classic, take a look in your fridge. See that Coca-Cola Classic can? Chances are it’s only a few months old. Contact Jim Cook at jcook@dothaneagle.com.