What’s the value of newspaper advertising?

Clive Palmer is reported to have spent close to $100 million on advertising during the federal election campaign with a significant chunk of that spent on newspaper ads.

If seats in parliament was the goal, the advertising failed.

While we could critique the ads as being the cause of the failure, the issue could also be the medium.

Is newspaper advertising as valuable as it once was?

We already know newspapers are not as valuable for the once rivers of gold real estate, employment and car advertising.

I am sure people far more skilled than me will dissect the Palmer ad spend and consider what it may indicate for newspapers and their publishers.

I’d be particularly interested in scholarly assessment of the Palmer spend coupled with the clear bias of News Corp in its propaganda type coverage supporting the Coalition parties and negatively covering Labor, and their even more negative coverage of the independents.

From a newsagent perspective, we are part of the distribution channel for print newspapers. The topic should interest us in the context of the role of newspapers in our future. I think this election showed us that newspapers, particularly the News Corp newspapers, are not as important or influential as they have been.

Will this 2022 federal election be something we look back on in the future as a point in time where the value the medium was significantly diluted because the actions of some newspaper publishers demonstrated disrespect for what was once a valued moral authority.

I know of a couple of newsagents who recently moved newspapers from the front of the shop to the rear because of election coverage in their main daily newspaper.

After writing this I caught up with the latest Media Watch …

“Well, the Coalition’s huge loss was also a smack in the face for the Murdochs, whose big-city tabloids did their utmost to get ScoMo home …”
#MediaWatch #auspol pic.twitter.com/R6q6vv30jg

— Media Watch (@ABCmediawatch) May 23, 2022