It’s official: The Hatchet has sold out – to a pizza place. OK, we haven’t actually sold out (though I am entertaining offers), but readers may harbor that sentiment after seeing the front page of this Thursday’s paper. The Hatchet, starting this Thursday and continuing for every Thursday of the semester, will feature a small color advertisement for a restaurant running along the bottom of its front page. Because of the way the newspaper prints, this small ad virtually guarantees that The Hatchet will have a color front page for all 29 issues of the spring semester.
This benefit, however, comes at a price, and not just for our advertiser. Some GW community members will undoubtedly think their newspaper is putting profits above integrity. My purpose in writing this short column is to preempt such notions and convince readers that I took their concerns into account before signing off on a front-page ad.
Traditionally, editors considered the front page of a newspaper, along with its opinion page, pure and inviolable. You won’t see ads on the front pages of this country’s most venerable journalistic institutions, The New York Times and The Washington Post. By contrast, less prestigious and more avowedly profit-driven papers, such as USA Today and The Post’s free daily Express, have small front-page ads that generate a lot of revenue, since advertisers highly covet the one part of the paper that every reader sees (I actually conceived of a small front-page ad for The Hatchet after picking up a copy of USA Today). The refusal of institutions such as The Times and The Post to make parts of their papers off limits to advertisers reeks of arbitrary symbolism. How does a small front-page ad differ from one on page two? An editor at one of these publications would likely respond that a reader shouldn’t be confronted with ads upon immediately picking up a paper; but that rejoinder doesn’t explain why they shouldn’t see something they see on almost every other page of a newspaper. Editors seem to have made a distinction where there shouldn’t be one.
It’d be reasonable for readers to assume the worst about the front-page ad. While The Hatchet, a non-profit corporation, relies almost solely on ad sales to fund its operations, profit was not the impetus behind our decision to sell a small part of the front page. The motivation was color, pure and simple. And because the front-page ad is so small, The Hatchet will not see a lot of direct revenue from it.
Color, as my colleague Sam Sherraden impressed upon me incessantly last semester, greatly enhances the work of our superb photo staff and gets more people to pick up the paper. The only way The Hatchet can come out in color without taking a financial hit is through getting clients to purchase color ads. A color ad every Thursday basically ensures The Hatchet’s being able to avert black-and-whiteness for the entire semester. For lack of color ads, The Hatchet looked like The Times circa 1985 in about six or seven issues last semester. That would not have been acceptable this semester.
Readers should not hesitate to espouse their concerns about the ad in letters to the editor ([email protected]) or on my blog, at hatchetblogs.com.
Here’s to a colorful semester at GW and in the paper.
-The writer, a senior majoring in international affairs, is Hatchet editor in chief – but thankfully not for too much longer.
