Newsrack Followup: 2003 Quote Sales Dropped 50 Percent

A quick followup to yesterday's post about newsracks:

I since found a New York Press article from 2003 that buttresses the argument group corporate pedmount newsracks injured newspaper 1) circulation and 2) profits long before smartphones. Pedmounts hurt circulation when cities installed them and replaced colorful individual newsracks.

The three arguments for individual newsracks against group pedpoints are:

1. Individual colorful newsracks displayed three facets (back, left and right side) to the public to advertise their brand, their logo and colors that differentiate themselves from competitors. Group grayscaled "pedmount" newsracks erase this branding. At most, the grayscaled pedmount newsracks print the masthead font on the cubby face and back. And a pedmount slot only displays the masthead on the back on some units (more on that in point #3.)
2. Individual newsrack placement around town allowed a newspaper to refine and again, differentiate its individual distribution strategy from competition. (More on that in the article.)
3. When papers were responsible for their own individual newsracks, they could recoup some costs by renting advertising space on the back, sides and face of the newsrack as long as it was smaller than the advertising for the newspaper itself. Group grayscaled pedmounts rent out the backs of all the individual cubbies en masse via large billboards that trump the already reduced individual branding of newspapers contained within. The New York Press article says the group pedmount corporation pockets the money without passing it on to publications like New York Press or New York Observer (or presumably the SF Weekly or SF Examiner.)

We could go on. To your friends who say "print is dead" the above article was run in 2003, four years before Apple debuted the iPhone in 2007 and nine years before smartphones hit critical masse in 2012. The 2003 piece contains a quote from USA Today:

"I'd say people probably buy 50 percent fewer papers when they're not in our own rack, with our own advertising on the outside," says Donohue of USA Today. "We tried [using the pedmounts], but it just didn't work out."

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The Getty Images photo is from a Toronto Star article.

Further Reading: The steps Tristan Harris advises for fighting smartphone addiction, when reversed, were what made individual pre-pedmount newspaper racks so effective:
- grayscale your phone (colors grab your attention)
- beware of sites without finishability, or avoid sites with "infinite scrolling"
- turn off push notifications (a newsrack freshly restocked with papers was a non-intrusive push notification)