The Philadelphia Inquirer, April 14

Inquirer tries new revenue tactics, such as selling column sponsorship

Times are tough at newspapers, and more of them, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, are boosting revenue by selling to advertisers prime space once considered the sacred province of news.

Starting April 15, Inquirer readers will see ads in the bottom right corner of the front page. And, beginning April 30, a new advertising format purchased by Citizens Bank will debut on the front of the weekday Business sections. It will include a Citizens Bank ad across the bottom of the page and another smaller ad in the top corner.

In a more unusual arrangement, a Citizens Bank label will run with a new column produced by Inquirer writers and editors. Some of the revenue from the ads will be used to hire an editor for the column, which will focus on short news items about local, publicly traded companies. The new feature will be boxed in green, Citizens Bank's color.

Media experts said April 13 that the branded column could be confusing to readers.

While there's nothing inherently wrong with sponsorship of editorial content, it can create the perception of advertiser influence, or the real thing, said Jill Geisler, who teaches ethics at the Poynter Institute, a St. Petersburg, Fla., school for journalists. Editorial independence is a core journalistic value.

Allowing such sponsorship is "a road that needs good guardrails," she said, "or you can drive yourself off a credibility cliff."

Inquirer editor William K. Marimow said Citizens Bank will have no control over the content of the new column. It will be "100 percent based on our news judgment and prerogatives," he said.

Some American newspapers accepted front-page ads long ago, and they are common today in European newspapers. Marimow said that, given modern revenue needs, "tasteful and discreet" ads were acceptable.

The Inquirer's will be two columns wide by 41/2 inches deep. The University of Pennsylvania Health System is the first purchaser.

"My feeling is that the trade-off between generating additional revenue in order to provide for good journalism is worth it," Marimow said.

He said he did not know which other types of news features he would consider for sponsorship.

The Inquirer was purchased last year by a local investor group, headed by former advertising executive Brian P. Tierney.

The new approach to advertising comes as newspapers nationwide are losing advertisers -- their primary source of income -- and readers to the Internet.

While advertising on newspaper Web sites is growing rapidly, it accounts for only about 5 percent of total revenue, said John Kimball, chief marketing officer for the Newspaper Association of America, a trade group. Nationally, ad revenue for the print version of newspapers has been holding steady, but is expected to drop slightly -- 0.5 percent to 1.5 percent -- this year.

Advertisers are asking for new formats, and growing numbers of newspapers have been creating them, Kimball said.

USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and others already have ads on Page One. Some have allowed advertisers to sponsor sports scoreboards and other elements of sports sections. Newspapers also are experimenting with new ad designs such as "goal posts" that feature thin vertical ads along edges of pages, or small blocks of advertising content that stairstep up or down pages.

In Philadelphia, Comcast Corp. recently began sponsoring The Inquirer's Sunday television guide, and Commerce Bank sponsors Inquirer Express, a one-page index to the news that runs daily on the back page of the Sports section.

Joseph Turow, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, said the "perception of conflict is obvious" with a branded business column. Cynical readers, he said, will wonder if The Inquirer will go easy on its news coverage of Citizens Bank. "You cannot bite the hand that feeds you and, in this case, it's quite clear who feeds you," he said.

In an age where almost anything can bear a brand, Richard Lancioni, marketing chair at Temple University's Fox School of Business, said he sees nothing wrong with the new approach. Putting ads from respected companies in high-profile positions is good for everybody, he said.

"If the brand has a high level of respect... and you put that somewhere next to the brand of the newspaper, it oftentimes is what you call marketing cobranding," he said, "where one helps the other."

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