Why I hate newspapers

New!! check below last updated Sunday August 19 2007

While I was in Miami years ago I never bought newspapers and I never read them regularly. Why? Because they were too d*** big. They flopped over themselves with more and more sections to the point that if I had a newspaper I felt like I was actually selling them since it seemed like I had about ten in my hands. There was simply too much information. Besides anything I wanted to know about I could just go to Google News and just check for myself. In the space of several clicks blam I was up to date about news in the world.

Then there was television and the people around me, if something was important someone else would soon tell me :) Trust me it worked well enough for my exam dates which I rarely checked, someone sooner or later or the teacher would say "ready for the exam next week" and I might check the syllabus and start studying.

With regards to putting an ad in the newspaper forget about it. I've place ads and had trouble finding them in the paper myself when I knew they were there, far less someone reading it who could care less about what you're selling.

On that note I figured "hey let's try a full or half page ad that'll get them! Do you realise that a half page ad costs between $4500 TT and $5,000 TT ($714 US to $800 US) per day depending on whether it's on a weekday or the weekend? That's $10,000 TT for a full page ad approximately!! So the next thing I did was make a rough total of all the ads in the papers. I came up with an estimated $200,000 TT worth of ads in a given day which is $6 million dollars a month and $36 million a year!I think I'm in the wrong business!

Aside from the money though the newspapers are filled with such junk that basically gets one feeling all riled up about social issues that have no bearing on one's real life and even if it is related what the heck are we supposed to do about it? The papers seems to have very little answers even when it comes to "health news". They merely list studies which disprove the studies that they ran the day,week,month or year before. Arrrggghh!!! Much ado about nothing.

On that note this is my suggestion which is something like my ex-gf once told me she did, don't read the newspapers or watch the news on tv, it may reduce your blood pressure by a significant amount plus save you money. I used to get heaps of junk mail in Miami and you know what, the marketers are right direct mailing works. By going through it I would see all this stuff that I wanted to get and I had to fight myself to avoid buying things I knew I didn't need. By avoiding the newspapers you'll avoid the point of the newspapers which is to sell stuff that people with enough advertising money to pay for noticeable ads are trying to sell you.

Do you really need a sandwich that costs as much as an entire chicken? Do you really need to pay as much for one night out as you'll pay for groceries for a couple days? For those who disagree I guess you also need to wake up "foreday morning", every weekday and travel up to three hours going and coming to help pay for your lifestyle but that's a whole other topic really and I know many people who make that choice for me it "aint happening".

At the end of the day, newspapers are pretty much just like what I found most television to be during a childhood period when we didn't have one, absolute trash that keeps making false promises to keep you reading and buying. Don't get me wrong I watch a lot of tv myself but I try to stick to the more filling kind educational shows, discovery channel etc but I also watch a lot of cr*p.

Anyway if you insist on reading newspapers please look out for mine. With all the money that newspapers are apparently making I think I'm try my hand at the business one of these days :) I have some cool ideas to try out for publications based on stuff from the US.

New!!

So after seeing an ad in the Express I thought that putting flyers in the newspapers might be more economical. I called and asked about it a while ago and was told that it was $150 TT or $23 US for every thousand flyers included in the newspapers. Sounded like a good deal, like a lot of people but I couldn't help but wonder how much it would cost to put them in all the newspapers.

Well without actually searching much at all I found out. The express sells 75,000 newspapers a day which comes up to a grand total of $11250 TT or $1786 US to put flyers in all the Express newspapers in the country per day. This is significantly above the cost of approximately $10,000 per day for a full page ad that I mentioned above plus the paper doesn't use up any space in the actual newspaper. What a bargain!

The extra costs might be because of more noticeability of a flyer or more effort is needed to place rather than print the ad in the paper.