Real content

Nearly every local business owner we know loves to complain about Yelp. They hate the negative reviews written by angry, self-entitled amateurs. They hate the aggressive sales techniques and the preferential treatment given to advertisers. And we agree. Yelp is terrible.

However, we often see some of the same business owners who complain about Yelp spending their advertising dollars on “sponsored posts” on Facebook or ads on various websites. Complaining about the petty, unethical, vindictive tone of internet “content creators” and “influencers,” while spending all your ad money online is worse than hypocritical; it’s self-defeating.

Obviously, we have a horse in this race. We give away this newspaper for free. And we’re able to do that because of support from our advertisers. At the RN&R, we keep a high degree of separation between advertising and editorial. There’s a literal as well as a figurative wall between the two departments. Over here on the editorial side, we don’t know what the ads are going to be until we see them in the published paper. And even then, we try not to pay very close attention. That doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate our advertisers; it just means that we don’t want the ads to influence future coverage.

That said, we still think print is the only media where readers treat the ads like real content. We change the channel during radio ads and mute the sound during TV commercials. We don’t clip them out of radio and television broadcasts. We can’t hit the X fast enough on online ads. Billboards are fine if you hate nature and love distracted drivers. We won’t sign on for either of those things. In fact, we dislike billboards so much that we’re inclined to avoid businesses that advertise on them.

But when we read magazines and newspapers, we look at the ads. (We’ll leave it to the fine folks on the RN&R sales team to demonstrate the wisdom of advertising in this paper rather than other local publications.)

This is a tough time for printed media. The executive branch of the U.S. government is openly hostile to traditional journalism. The latest salvo is a proposed tariff on imports of Canadian uncoated groundwood papers—this includes newsprint and the paper used in book publishing. This would harm every aspect of the printed word.

Local journalists must also compete against the corporate infiltration of companies like Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns KRNV and KRXI here in Reno, and dictates national scripts for their “local” reporters to recite.

Journalism needs community support, and advertising is a mutually beneficial way to do that. And if you give your advertising dollars to giant online megaliths rather than local media outlets, then don’t waste our time with feel-good messages about “buying local” or rants about whatever websites you don’t like.