Boston Herald Advertises Result of Its Brutal Layoffs

October 7, 2018

Our kissin’ cousins at One-Daily Town noted this the other day, but it bears repeating in this space: Since Digital Fist – sorry, First – Media bought the shaky local tabloid, the paper has gone from 225 employees to roughly 100, with the newsroom barely able to field a softball team.

And the lost jobs are not being outsourced as much as insourced – moved to other parts of the Digital First conglomerate.

So, for instance, the Herald’s copy editing is now done in Denver, as the Boston Globe’s Jon Chesto noted on Friday.

Much of the copy editing work heads to DFM employees in Denver, and ad sales increasingly will be handled out of Lowell, where DFM owns the Lowell Sun.

 

Some of the ad sales, however, are migrating to another DFM division – Denver-based Adtaxi – as this house ad indicates.

 

 

Adtaxi is a clearinghouse for ad placement and describes itself with gobbledygook like this:

“Taking an omnichannel approach, Adtaxi offers a true full-funnel solution powered by our intelligent optimization technology, Quantum, that drives performance to the conversion metrics that matter most to your business.”

 

As the sadreading staff at One-Daily Town said, “A Herald sales rep wouldn’t be caught dead talking like that. But a dead paper walking? Sure.”

Two postscripts:

1) From our Irony Deficient Herald desk

Yesterday’s shrinky local tabloid not only ran the Adtaxi ad, but also featured this AP story: “Jobless rate lowest since ’69.”

Except at the Herald, of course.

2) Also from our Irony Deficient Herald desk

The sketchy local tabloid has been running this small house ad almost every day for the past few weeks.

 

 

Except at the Herald, of course.


Hark! The Herald! (Trusted? Better Verify Edition)

September 28, 2018

Latest in our endless series from the selfie local tabloid

As the hardreading staff was leafing through our New! Costlier! Boston Herald this morning, we came across this small house ad on page 9.

 

 

Who knew, right?

(To be sure graf goes here.)

To be sure, we have, on occasion, been wary of trusting the pluggy local tabloid regarding such matters, so we decided to check out that Brand Keys outfit, and here’s what we found.

A recent Brand Keys study measured “trust” among readers of their newspapers-of-choice.

Sure, ideology self-defines selection when it comes to subscribing to a newspaper (in print or digital), but “Trust” accounts for 41% of actual newspaper brand engagement.

The remaining 59% is accounted for by content and values addressing “entertainment listings and sports,” “an ability to educate and inform via news reporting, columnists, and editorial,” and providing insights into the “economy and local events and markets.”

 

The study asked 3800 readers – either print subscribers or regular digital readers (3+ times a week) – to evaluate their newspapers.

Drumroll, please.

 

 

Given its perhaps unlikely presence on the list, you can understand the chants of “We’re Number Twelve!” echoing around Fargo Street.

But when you think about it, 18% of regular Herald readers don’t trust the paper; of course, that’s also true of 14% of Boston Globe readers.

Maybe they should crisscross.