After a sizable advertising campaign, media interviews, plenty of commentary and a ton of hype, The Saturday Age newspaper finally launched last weekend. The new design, the new masthead and other changes were going to staunch the financial bleeding of the newspaper. Victorians were told this was a new newspaper, a newspaper we had to try. They want to get old readers back.
This week, a week later, the new newspaper is so important to the folks at Fairfax that they were prepared to take money from an advertiser to cover up their new masthead. Yes, some bucks promoting Coon cheese is more important than the new name, The Saturday Age. I was shocked to see this, even for Fairfax and their penchant for these nasty post-it type ads which are all too often stuck on the front page of the newspaper, over editorial coverage or over the newspaper masthead itself – as they did yesterday.
Where is the pride and trust in their rebranding of the newspaper? Given their treatment of the new name yesterday I wonder at the money spent promoting it all around Melbourne in the weeks leading up to the launch.