MediaNews Group and its gnarled mess of subsidiaries that make the newspaper chain seem like it wants its properties in a witness protection program is at it again, this time in Southern California. As it does here with its Bay Area News Group, or BANG, MediaNews’ LA area papers are part of LANG (Los Angeles Newspaper Group, get it?). Now, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, Pasadena Star-News, Torrance Daily Breeze and a half-dozen other papers will become “editions” of the Los Angeles Daily News in the San Fernando Valley.
That’s the same gimmick MediaNews employs in the Bay Area with the Oakland Tribune, Contra Costa Times, Marin IJ et al, deemed “editions” of the San Jose Mercury News. The clumsy work-around is to have writers employ the phrase “this newspaper” in stories, which lets readers make up their own minds what they want to call the newspaper they’re reading. It’s all pretty silly, not to mention disingenuous. In case you’ve never really understood it, read the memo from LANG chief Jack Klunder (via LA Observed, after the jump) and do a mental plug-and-play for the Bay Area. It’s the same shtick.
Starting Monday, you’ll notice a small line under each of our mastheads (or flags) identifying the publication as “an edition of the Los Angeles Daily News.” The reason for this is due to our company’s new method of reporting circulation to the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly ABC, or Audit Bureau of Circulations).
By combining and reporting all of our daily and weekly publications under one title, it increases our rank and clearly identifies the Los Angeles Daily News brand as a “Top Ten” media buy. In fact, when combining our circulation under one brand, our total daily volumes currently ranks 9th highest in the nation and our Sunday totals rank 13th (see ranking on following page). We want to make it easy for large-scale advertisers to recognize the strength and total reach of our entire group.
We have already been including this tag on many of our weekly publications for the past year which you can refer to as an example. We think that making this change in compliance with Alliance for Audited Media will command the attention of national agency buyers and hopefully influence them to consider all LANG newspapers for their advertising orders.
For readers and advertisers, there will be no noticeable change as all LANG publications will retain their individual branding, mastheads and locally focused content.
