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- Allow advertisers to choose between home delivery and single-copy distribution
- Provide unduplicated total-market coverage once a week
- Offer ZIP code distribution capabilities both daily and Sunday
- Accept preprints at least seven days before publication
- Bill preprint advertisers with a standard invoice.
Newspapers aren't the only ones overwhelmed by the rising flood of preprints. Consider the complaint levied by one subscriber of the Naples (Fla.) Daily News.
"His dog...couldn't get the Sunday newspaper into his house," said Corbin Wyant, the paper's president and publisher. Small wonder, considering some Sunday editions of the 41,029-circulation morning paper include as many as 32 inserts and weigh more than four pounds.
That's nothing new, recalled Wyant, who first raised concerns about preprints cannibalizing run-of-paper advertising at a publishers' conference 38 years ago. But no one anticipated the effects of commercial-printing improvements or the advent of large chain retailers that led preprint expenditures to outpace ROP in recent years.
Because of commercial printing and distribution, only roughly one-third of preprint expenditures wind up in the hands of newspapers, Wyant acknowledged. However, without printing expenses, much of that money is pure profit, and overall "insert business has on balance benefited us as an industry," he said.
Accordingly, the NAA-sponsored Quality Insert Program offers papers an opportunity to make "newspaper insert buys more compelling," Wyant said. Participating papers will:
"There are some challenges associated with QIP," Wyant said, and the Naples paper offers a good example of why. As circulation climbed upward from 5,000 over the past few decades, the paper began zoning preprints daily. Two rebuilt inserters and a rebuilt quarter-stitcher folder helped meet demand within capital restraints, Wyant said. However, Sunday zoning, as far out of reach of the paper's equipment as its subscriber's dog, remains an unresolved priority.
New production-control software will allow Naples to "better target inserts and create any number of zone configurations," Wyant added. "We expect to have an accurate total for misses and doubles."
And perhaps what comes around will go around. A preprint advertiser faced with jockeying for attention with 30 other inserts "will surely see the wisdom of putting his advertising back in ROP," Wyant predicted. "Of course, I said that...at a dozen preprints..."
--by Mark Toner