One of the most important papers in the US is the Columbia (SC) City Paper, an alt weekly that is fighting local corruption–for real, and in the courts–and defending the 99% against great odds in the heart of the Bible Belt.
Now they’re really up against it financially.
The 1% really hate this paper. They even firebombed the editor’s house.
So here’s what I’m asking: go to their website. Buy an ad.
Simple.
For next week’s issue it is $99 for a 1/8th page, $195 for a quarter, $299 for a half, or $599 for a full page. These prices are for this week only and the ad copy and payment are due by Monday.
Support real independently-owned journalism. Save the City Paper.
8 Comments.
Do they have a subscription rate? That would be helpful.
@Susan: I am afraid that a subscription to the Columbia City Paper might not be the best possible investment that one could make at this point. Unless more people pony up some substantial cash in a hurry, I’m afraidthey are not long for this world.
In their Media Kit, they mention that 70% of their readership are frequent beer drinkers. They should get more beer advertisements then. Either big name brands or microbreweries. And of course, tobacco companies are always looking to advertise. And, they could easily put some ads on their website, I would think.
@Ted
I would suggest a fundraiser, then.
Actually, buying an ad shows more solidarity.
I keep trying to contact their sales department (sales@columbiacitypaper.com) but it apparently is not a real or functional e-mail address (or it is blocking my e-mail for some reason and not sending any response instead of a blocking or “refused” type response.) I have confirmed that @columbiacitypaper.com is a real hosting address (hosted via google apparently) that does have at least some real and functional e-mail addresses associated with it, but “sales” doesn’t seem to be one of them. I have contacted the publisher (paul@columbiacitypaper.com) about this, but haven’t heard back yet. At least paul@columbiacitypaper.com appears to be a real e-mail address unlike sales@columbiacitypaper.com. I would presume this just to be an error in listing the correct e-mail address for sales department except for the fact that this address appears to be listed precisely as sales@columbiacitypaper.com many places all over the site suggesting to me that they, at least, believe it to be the correct address.
On a random side note, going by their posted stats for ad targeting (and assuming fully independent events for each stat which is likely a very bad assumption) then more then 0.1% of their readership are business owners or corporate officers who make more then $100,000 but don’t own their own home and don’t have a high school degree. A strange demographic indeed.
Oh shoot, I am half awake, Ted could you do a huge favor? I shouldn’t have posted email address that web bots can strip off your site, could you butcher those in my post below in a legible fashion, like replacing the “@” with ” AT ” or some such? Sorry for the inconvenience I should be more careful. I typically only drop unbutchered e-mail addresses when I am hoping to bait web crawlers into spamming the recipient.
Oh dear, the Columbia City Paper apparently doesn’t have a paper anymore, so they don’t actually have any ad space anymore. Here was the reply I got when trying to buy ads:
>Hi —–!
>After six years of battling the establishment in South Carolina for the amusement of our readers, we >unfortunately just stopped publishing a print edition. Rising printing and court costs just doesn’t >make it worth publishing news these days.
>However, I’ll send you a web rate card in the next day in case you have interest in web exposure, as >we are driving our readership towards the world wide web.
>Best regards,
>Paul Blake
There goes my little plan, unless Ted and others are interested in some free web banners. Not quite the same thing as free space in a newspaper integrated among the pages, I know, but it is the only thing that is still available.