In my small town, we have a local, weekly newspaper called the Whitewater Register. It’s part of a chain of local weeklies in my part of the state. I follow of the paper, of which I have been a critic. Here’s the first of three Register Watch posts on recent issues of the paper.
Dream towns.
This post covers the Register edition for August 7th, 2008. I correctly predicted the lead (lede) story – of the August 7th issue, in a post entitled, “Municipal Exaggeration: Dream Towns” that I published on the morning of August 7th. Anyone would have spotted the Register story a mile away.
In that post, I showed how a survey that supposedly described Whitewater as a dream town was really describing a much bigger area, an area that actually outperformed Whitewater in the measurements surveyed.
The question for me was why Whitewater’s city government and city manager would even bother to flack the findings, as those findings did not describe our city. I have no idea, but perhaps it was enticing just to find a favorable survey that used the name Whitewater. That’s no reason to use the study – but the desire to look good sometimes takes on an expression of the foolish and unrealistic.
The Register‘s August 7th picked up on the survey, under the headline, “Livin’ in a Dream.” That the title is double-edged might have escaped the Register, but is apparent nonetheless. I’d be the first to contend that the desire to live in a dream – rather than see things as they are – keeps our town back. We could be a true dream town one day, but not by pretending that we are one now.
Advertisements.
There’s something else in the Register that’s interesting to me, but it’s on the back page of the main section of the paper. There’s a half page ad for merchants in historic…Delavan. Delavan is a nearby town, once derided by long-standing residents as a second-rater, that now outperforms Whitewater in several common measurements of community well-being.
Why the large ads for Delavan in the Whitewater Register? I have observed before that the Register‘s principal ads often are not for businesses in Whitewater, but elsewhere: Elkhorn, Burlington, Delavan, etc. That’s true in this issue, too. By my count, of approximately 50 picture ads in the main section of the paper, only about 20%, are from businesses located in Whitewater.
Since the Register is part of a chain, and Delavan has a newspaper in the same chain, it’s likely that ads in one paper are spread over several publications. I have no idea what the rate card’s like for a business’s out-of-town advertising, as against home-town advertising, or what additional value it might provide to an advertiser.
(A quick check of another newspaper in the chain reveals that the Delavan ad ran in more than one non-Delavan paper, not merely the Register.)
I’ll talk about advertising, circulation, and the future of local weeklies in my next post.