One thing that has been annoying the hell out of me the last couple months has been the The Blade’s Precision Marketing campaign. According to their website, Precision Marketing is “The Blade’s targeted advertising package is delivered weekly to homes in the Toledo market where residents are not subscribing to The Blade.”
What they really mean to say is it is a way for them to throw these little blue bags containing some random newspaper with possibly local content into neighborhoods, almost specifically on days when there is above average wind. As a result, you’ll find these bags on lawns, tree lawns, sidewalks, or in the street. A number of times, I’ve walked around my apartment complex picking up these things. The only good thing that comes out of this, which does not make up for the distribution of these items, is that the bags themselves can be taken to Kroger along with other plastic bags and recycled, and the newspapers can be dumped at the recycling center. Still, the fact that not everyone does this means that the Blade is really just making a mess out of Bowling Green just to get their subscriptions up.
Dear Blade, if you haven’t realized, it is 2007, and more and more people probably get their news from this thing called “the Internet”. As a result, the number of subscriptions is likely to go down.
As someone who has followed the Bland’s recent “investigation” of the University of Toledo, I have realized that the newspaper has officially dropped down to the level of a tabloid. Surprisingly, I find the S-T is actually a pretty solid newspaper and the fact they’re finally online really means I have no reason to read the Blade anymore.
What newspapers haven’t realized is that they can’t make money off print much longer. They need to start looking into selling ad space on their sites and pushing more people there.