Ad-ing Something Else

One month ago, Gannett Co. Inc announced its intention to downsize by roughly 1,000 workers nationwide, (according to The Huffington Post) due to low profits and difficulties with advertising sales. With its status as the biggest nationwide newspaper company, the decline in advertising and funding is disturbing not only from a large-scale, economical standpoint, but also from the perspective of a print media consumer, as a lack of advertising represents a serious plummet in interest and readership. Although this is not an immediate cause for alarm, (journalism exists in a number of medias and forms that are experiencing success) it is important to realize that the advertising business is perhaps headed for the most dramatic shift that the industry has ever weathered.

The media has been creative in their ability to find new ways to generate interest in advertising for the new mediums that have emerged in the last several years. Online video clips that include a preliminary commercial, scrolling margins that advertise specialized products, and corner links at the bottom of almost every webpage have all contributed to the funding and success of journalism in its most recent media. However, this will not prove to be enough in the coming years. As much as many would like to believe that journalism is free of the chains of political agendas and financial gain, it is a business like any other. There will have to be a more reliable technological way of guaranteeing the support of advertisers. Like the rise of the Internet itself, online journalism has become increasingly hard to monitor and document.The media will be required to find new ways to walk the constant tight rope between audience and advertiser satisfaction. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the shift in the relationship between demographic records and digital advertising has hardly begun.