LA Weekly reports on a development that may kill two mediums with one stone. Apparently, movie studios plan to kill their full-page advertising for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. (At $100,000 per full-page ad, that adds up to a lot of dough.) The justification? The studios want to attract younger, lowbrow moviegoers and they view these two newspapers as “older and elitist.”
This is a fascinating development for several reasons: (1) This only confirms the notion that Hollywood is uninterested in making adult films (or at least appealing to adult audiences). (2) Studios have previously thrown so much money at publicity that their lavish spreads have seemed almost inconsequential. Is this a sign that they’re starting to tighten their belts? (3) That entities as slow-moving as movie studios recognize the declining readership of newspapers suggests that, at least on the entertainment front, we’re about to see a real transformation in entertainment journalism and related media. I sincerely hope that online outlets aren’t co-opted, along the lines of the corrupt Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Of course, since this isn’t yet a fait accompli, expect to see Bill Keller promote more entertainment-oriented junk on the front page in a last-minute effort to woo back Hollywood.
on the flip side, while the Journalism side of print media willl say that they don’t cover/review films based on where they get ad dollars from, it may be interesting to track how the removal of this perceived, if not actual, conflict of interest may shift the coverage of the movies.
[…] With both of these stories, there seems to be a clear and resounding message here. If you’re a journalist, even a syndicated columnist, getting up in years, don’t expect to be respected. Don’t even expect to be treated with any polite exit procedure. With newspapers already facing possible threats from major advertisers looking for a “younger, lowbrow” demographic, rather than an “older and elitist one,” could it be that newspapers are panicking and taking this attitude too much to heart? […]