Friday, April 15, 2005

Philadelphia Gay News Death Watch, Part 1

Mark my words - The Philadelphia Gay News (PGN) will cease to exist in five years. “Gay” may be its middle name, but R.I.P. will be its last word.

As gay people integrate themselves in the Philadelphia community, along with the rise of the Internet, the PGN has lost its relevance. Its core readership is there but shrinking. Advertisers are fleeting.

The PGN used to be the talk of the town every Friday afternoon. The most read section of the PGN used to the Classifieds section. It was a popular way for gays to meet. With the advent of the Internet, online dating has toppled the PGN Classifieds. Gay-related contents and directories are also easier to find on the Internet. Local gay news is no longer a conversation topic, except for a few aging urban gay men. Local print media such as the Philadelphia Inquire, Daily, Philadelphia Weekly, and City Paper are less reluctant to cover local gay events. The old PGN has ran its course. It lost, fair and square.

It’s a matter of time before the paper folds. Its recent switch to the tabloid format reduces overhead cost and disguises dwindling advertisements, and simply delays the inevitable. I will miss it dearly.

While smaller display ads are important, they command much less rate, based on industry standard column-inch fee structure. The smaller display ads will at best help the paper break even. Full-page and half-page ads bring in the profits.

I intend to conduct regular display ad counts in this Death Watch column. I expect that the number of pages will gradually drop along with display advertisers. There will be a few outliers due to seasonal demands.

Without further introduction, this is my
PGN Death Watch - Part 1

Last week’s issue (April 8-14, 2005)

Volume 29 No. 14

No. of pages: seventy-two (72)


No. of full-page display ads: four (4)

  1. Gay.com
  2. Washington DC Convention & Tourism Corp.
  3. Gay and Lesbian World Travel Expo 2005 (Philadelphia)
  4. Showtime Entertainment (Queer as Folk 4th season DVD set)

No. of half-page display ads: thirteen (13)

  1. Suburu Symmetrical All-Wheel Driving System
  2. MINI Cooper Covertible
  3. The Mazzoni Center (AIDS Hotline)
  4. Arch Financial Services
  5. Manayunk Design District
  6. Red Barn Books (adult bookstore)
  7. 1-800-GAY LIVE (phone sex)
  8. M4M-USA.COM (web sex connection)
  9. Adonis Cinema Complex
  10. Premier Escorts
  11. Cherokee Rental Apartments
  12. Philadelphia Film Festival
  13. North 3rd (pub)

While performing the ad analysis of this issue, I was a little concerned with the large number of house ads (touting different PGN sections and services) and full-page section breaks. House ads wrapping around a irregular half-page display ad irriate me. This is a sign of sloppiness and/or incompetence. The ratio between total number of pages (72) and total pages devoted to full and half-page ads (11) is higher than I expected.

posted by Anh at 9:18 PM

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You don't really know Mark Segal. PGN will still be here. You aren't the first person who predicted doom and demise for PGN. A lot of people thought it was gonna be dead 10 years ago. If anything, I think PGN will undergo another change and be freshened up.

If the Gay Community allows its own paper to die--then it will be the beginning of their own political end.

Of course, you young twenty-somethings think that you don't need community and involvement. Bleak, hard years are coming. In 10 years, you will see an embattled gay community and large scale opression. The Religious Right are counting on the apathy of the young gay generation.

History shows that as war and poverty ripped the Weimar Repupublic apart--the free gay community of Berlin were imprisoned, bars closed and homosexuality criminalized. Expect it here in the next ten years. It has started now.

5:38 PM  

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