Media Curmudgeon

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September 25, 2007

Rategate: Win Some, Lose Some

Blogging is an exhilarating and humbling experience. Getting it right is cool and feeds my overfed ego; getting it wrong is humbling, which pleases my wife and kids. In my September 17, blog titled “MoveOn.org’s Petraeus Ad,” I wrote:

“I don’t believe that the Times broke its rate card for MoveOn.org, that Mathis is being candid, and that Jeff Jarvis is wrong (about cutting rates because newspaper ad revenue is down). The rate is legit and has nothing to do with newspapers offering big discounts because of ad declines. The Times, which has a pretty good sales organization, understands that lowering prices doesn’t create demand. Where else but the Times would an advocacy ad like this have such a huge impact? There is still large demand for ads in the Times by many advertisers, especially those who want to try to influence the political discussion agenda. The reason overall demand for newspaper advertising is down is because major advertisers such as automotive and financial services are cutting back, not those who want to influence the national debate. In fact, the MoveOn.org ad created demand—the Giuliani campaign bought an ad in response a couple of days later.”

So my face was as red as Rudolph’s nose when I read the NY Times’ Public Editor, Clark Hoyt’s, column this past Sunday (the 23rd) in which he wrote: “Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse?
The answer to the first question is that MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.”

Ooops. I thought the rate was “legit.” I couldn’t imagine the Times cutting its rates. It never occurred to me that one of its sales reps couldn’t read its Byzantine rate card. It seems that Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis doesn’t understand the rate card either. Here’s what she told BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine, as reported in his blog: “I should note here that Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis confirmed to me what MoveOn.org already said about said ad--that it cost $65,000, and that it was in keeping with the going rate for 'open' political advocacy ads--that is, ads for which the Times has discretion on when to run them.”

The rate MoveOn.org got was not an open rate—an open rate is the top rate an advertiser pays and for which the Times will place the ad in the section an advertiser prefers. The Times’ rate card in the Business section, under Causes and Appeal/Political, shows an open rate of $1,442 per column inch, or $181,692 for a 126-inch full page ad. The closest rate to get to the $142,083 Hoyt says MoveOn.org “should have” paid is the 20-page rate of $1,133 per column inch, or $142,758. But to earn that rate, the lowest Nationwide Weekday rate, it would have to have run or promise to run 20 pages. If you divide $142,083 by 126, you get $1,127.64 per column inch—a rate that appears nowhere on the Times rate card in that category.

This nitpicking points out several things: 1) No one, including the Times salesperson, its corporate spokesperson, or its Public Editor understands or can read the newspaper’s rate card. 2) That Catherine Mathis doesn’t know the difference between an open and a stand-by rate, which isn’t so bad because the rate card is so confusing, but it spotlights the fact the Times’ official spokesperson is probably knee-jerk defensive and can’t be trusted to be candid. This Rategate is no Jason Blair scandal, but it’s still embarrassing for the so-called journal of record—it can’t seem to keep its records or its stories straight—it looks like the Abbott and Costello “Who’s on first” routine, or even “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”

To me the rate MoveOn.org paid is not as important as the fact that the Times ran the ad with the offensive subhead. Here’s what the Times’ Public Editor Hoyt wrote: “The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, ‘We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.’ Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, said that, while it was ‘rough,’ he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.’”

Jespersen’s title is director of advertising acceptability and he didn’t do his job—he screwed up. He should have tried to get MoveOn.org to change the headline, as I suggested in my earlier blog. At a time when the Times is cutting newsroom jobs in response to lower ad revenue, it ought to consider cutting fat, not muscle. Pare down the bureaucracy, not reporters who create content for the paper and website. Stop paying bureaucrats to make bad decisions and utter defensive, inaccurate public announcements—it sounds like the government. Fire Jespersen and Mathis and get rid of the sales force. Google sells about five times as much advertising as the NY Times does and does it via the Internet. Computers don’t make rate-quoting mistakes and Google’s system is based on bidding—an auction—for ad space.

If MoveOn.org had been required to bid for the Monday ad it wanted, it would have paid a lot more than $65,000 for a full-page ad, as evidenced by the fact that it agreed to pay $77,000 more to correct the mistake, as reported by the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz. MoveOn.org probably would have paid more than $142,000 if it had to bid for it.

So I lost one—I was wrong about the Times’ “legit” rate—and I won one—I was right about not running the ad. I apologize for the error, but I’ll be glad to live with my batting average.

Posted by Charles Warner at September 25, 2007 11:45 AM

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Media Curmudgeon at September 27, 2007 06:21 PM writes:

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