Star-Bulletin special

[Media Guy]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

I read mine on my phone.

[808golfer]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

Buzz does make a reasonable point but I'll go further. Until the day comes when you see online newspaper readers reading pages and pages (ok, screens) of ads from Macy's, KMart, Longs, Safeway, Comp USA and the hundreds and hundreds of other smaller advertisers whom have paid the newspaper.com site the same tens of millions of dollars for their "electronic ad" that they would have paid for print, the printed version will be fine. Let's face it, without the ads some of you make note of that you can do without, how does the newspaper.com pay for the salaries and other related costs required to gather the content? When you find a local newspaper.com site that operates without a print version let me know. To put it another way, does anyone really think that if the Star Bully shut down 6 years ago that the SB.com site would still be around? For that matter, could the Hono Advertiser.com survive without the print ads footing the content bill?

[buzz1941]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

I am happy to report that I lowballed our circulation. It's substantially more than 60,000 and has been for some time. It's also not a secret. The audit reports are available to anyone who asks. (But don't ask me! I'm not an ad sales guy!) The big advertisers like Sears who are moving over to the Star-Bulletin are doing their due diligence in that regard.

[Nords]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

They also, as we all know, decided to run that story on Bishop Estate.

Yeah, because first Roth et al got strung along and ultimately dumped by the Advertiser!

Good thing you're not a coupon clipper! And good thing you don't care about national and international news, sports, business and features, or comic strips or national columnists, or local sales and advertising news, because none of that content is in your online edition.
Newspapers can also be "scanned" much faster by your analog Mark.1 eyeball. They are designed to deal with a great deal of information in an efficient manner. Getting your news one story at a time online is tunnel vision, and takes substantially longer to do, and ties you to your computer. Some people like that, or they're only interested in a couple of things at a time, in which case getting all your news online is fine.
I guess your computer and online server fees are free too?

We subscribed to both the S-B and the Advertiser for over a decade, then cut back to the Advertiser's Sunday edition for another five years. Last year we cancelled all newspapers and we're not going back to print. I'm ready to start whittling back the magazines, too.

I think the quality of the Advertiser's reporting is good (one of my neighbors is David Waite), perhaps better than the S-B, but my subscriber's complaint is with the marketing/advertising people and the distributors.

A couple points to consider:
- I'm no longer awakened by minivans (or scooters!) idling by my driveway and banging papers against my garage door at oh-dark-thirty.
- We get better coupons (for less effort) from the store's flyers & mailers. We also do better from the product manufacturer's website and CoolSavings.com. But even better than brand-name coupons are the local/generic brands and... Costco.
- I do care about national/international news, which is why my online daily bookmarks include Reuters.com, IHT.com, & WSJ.com. Many columnists are online and for my personal interests there's Google Alerts. There's also Businessweek.com and The Economist. In fact we're drowning in online news and we really only need newsprint for vermiposting.
- I agree about scanning a printed page, but I find that I can scan a summary page (like Reuters.com) a lot faster than having to go through printed pages of ads. I hate to say it, Burl, but your method of visually scanning paper is not what younger generations are accustomed to. They're much faster at setting up a custom news screen and scanning it. Kinda hard to customize the print version, and I'm just wasting my time with the sports & fashion pages.
- It really sucks to read a printed page and have to tear out the URL for additional reading. Online I just follow the links.
- Does the Advertiser.com webmaster compare their page-loading time to the Star-Bulletin? Advertiser may have more "meat" but their website is slow & bloated compared to the S-B summary screen.
- Midweek should subcontract their printing to the Advertiser. The Advertiser's press makes the rest of the island's papers look pretty blurry.
- I can get just about any comic online, but even subscriber comics are cheaper than newspaper subscriptions. Best of all I don't have to wade through comics I don't care about. My free favorites are Dilbert.com, Doonesbury.com, Calvin & Hobbes, and Liberty Meadows (the latter two not available in newspapers). I actually pay real money for Sally Forth & Zits, and they're worth it.

I'm glad the Advertiser is clamping down on the printed distribution. For a good bit of last year I thought I was going to have to file a complaint about the Advertiser's practice of leaving unsolicited newspapers in our driveway, just like a drug dealer handing out free samples. I finally had to ask both newpaper's cold-calling staffs to put us on their DO NOT CALL lists.

[unidentifiedstar]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

Good points!

Since the Bull's circulation audit appears to be freely available, could someone post some of the details here? Who performed the audit? Does the audit show which papers are paid-for and which ones are freebies?

[Mike_Lowery]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

I get my newspapers FREE everyday just by going online and reading it. Its just as good as buying it off the rack. Aloha, BigD.

I generally like the perspective of SB writers over Advertiser writers, but I prefer the smell of the Advertiser's paper.

Have you tried rolling up a website to whack people?

[Kimo]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

And today's "Latest News" online column in PBN reports:

http://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/s...=et71&ana=e_du

(SB circulation at 64K)

[unidentifiedstar]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

I find it interesting that the Star-Bulletin publisher refuses to say how many papers are given away, especially when he counts those freebies in the paper's total circulation. Why hide the number? Saying that the "vast majority" of their papers are paid for says nothing. With a stated circulation of 64k, they could give away 15,000 papers a day and still say the same thing. And I just don't see how a free newspaper (or a deeply discounted paper) can command the same ad rates and revenues as a newspaper that readers pay for. More information is still needed here. I want the SB to stick around -- could you imagine this town with only the Honolulu Agonizer left as a daily? -- but I would like more honesty from the SB.

[Erika Engle]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

Why not divulge all the details?

Hmmm. Maybe because we're in a hugely competitive marketplace?

Maybe because the Advertiser has a history of trying to kill our business?

If you had a handful of bullets for your gun, would you share your ammo willingly with your much larger enemy?

[buzz1941]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

Along with Erika, I'm not going along on this fishing expedition.

[unidentifiedstar]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

Those explanations don't cut it for me. It's one thing to tell your advertisers that your circulation is 64,000 -- which is what the Star-Bull has been doing -- and it would be quite another to tell advertisers that only 50,000 of those papers are actually paid for. Your advertisers, and the public by extension, deserve to know the real numbers.

And this whole "blame Gannett every time the toilets get stopped up" is too much like making excuses. Gannett clearly has tried to kill the Bulletin, no question, but the "poor us" routine lost credibility around the time the Bulletin's top reporters began exiting in droves. The Gannett Advertiser was unusually wise to snap some of them up. The Star-Bulletin also attempted to shake up the market by giving away classified ads. At the time, your publisher said part of the plan was to "build" your circulation by selling papers to eager new advertisers. Since the Bulletin now is practically giving papers away too, that effort was something less than a stellar success. Is that Gannett's fault too?

[buzz1941]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

Perhaps you need to be honest about who you work for and why you're so interested in spreading innuendo.

[LikaNui]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

Perhaps you need to be honest about who you work for and why you're so interested in spreading innuendo.

I was wondering the same thing. However, check out their first two posts upon joining us at HT. The first one was at this link and the second was at this link. But all their posts since then have been about the newspapers.

[Media Guy]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

I know this is going to open up a can of worms but I can't help myself. I haven't seen any innuendo in these posts.

Burl & Erika, you two are too good at what you do to allow petty biases cloud your objectbility on this subject. Some people just have some negative thoughts about your employer, and they don't all work for the competition.

Why is it if someone says anything remotely negative about the Star Bulletin they are accused of working for the Advertiser? Can't people just express their opinion or be curious as to why the Star Bulletin is secretive about it's circulation numbers.

I know they aren't audited by ABC because the powers that be feel ABC is biased towards Gannett, but it's kinda like Oceanic Cable discounting Neilsen ratings because it's baised towards broadcast. Industry standard is industry standard.

I also agree that it's getting a little tired hearing how all that's bad in the world is caused by Gannett. Yes they are a huge coporation. Yes their coporate motto is "drain the pond," but you know what? Star Bulletin has put up a good fight, has good content and Hawaii wants a two-paper town. But the facts are, Gannett isn't going away any time soon, and the Advertiser apparently is going to be the dominate paper in the market for the time being.

[dick]

Re: Star-Bulletin special

Why is it if someone says anything remotely negative about the Star Bulletin they are accused of working for the Advertiser? Can't people just express their opinion or be curious as to why the Star Bulletin is secretive about it's circulation numbers.

Who accused who of "working for the Advertiser" in this thread?