Department of disquieting declarations

“Print Insists It’s Here to Stay” — the headline in yesterday’s NYTimes yesterday — ranks right up there with Richard Nixon’s “I’m no crook” in the department of disquieting declarations.

Turns out newspapers and magazines are going to spend 10s of millions of dollars advertising to… umm… remind advertisers that their money is best spent in newspapers and magazines. Watching the pulp-vendors spend that money will be a major test of their own perception of where readers are headed. They won’t spend the money in their own pages, obviously, because they can place house ads for free, right? Anyway, the challenges are great.

Earl C. Cox, who is the Martin Agency’s chief executive and is leading the newspapers’ public relations campaign, told newspaper executives at a recent conference that the current perception of newspapers among advertisers was that they were “static, inflexible and hard to buy.” And, he added, “It doesn’t help any that media buyers are under 30 and their focus is elsewhere,” mostly on the Internet.

Hmm. Maybe these folks should consider advertising on blogs?

I should make clear that I love reading The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Time and Newsweek in print. I’d hate to recline on the couch clutching my laptop. But I’m increasingly annoyed by articles and ads I see in newspapers. They look dull and preachy and dated. I wonder how long it will before advertising in print, like not having a URL a few years ago, hurts a company’s image?