Editorials

On Monday it will have been three years since the O’Malley family paid a few thousand dollars for the name and distribution boxes of the original version of the Berkeley Daily Planet. A few old Macs and some horrendous metal desks were thrown in gratis. 

Since then, we’ve won a number of prizes and gotten considerable satisfaction from keeping East Bay residents informed about news that affects their lives. We take full credit for the striking improvement in Berkeley coverage on the part of the metropoli tan dailies—we’ve finally shamed them out of doing only “Berzerkley” stories. By almost any measure, the editorial content of our paper is a critical success. 

We’ve also spent considerably more money than our original investment just keeping the paper af loat. Conventional wisdom in the business is that it takes five years for a new publication to break even, and by that standard we’re on target. But it is still puzzling to us why a number of long-established Berkeley businesses refuse to advertise in the Planet.  

A very few of them have told our advertising sales representatives that they’re offended by our habit of giving exposure to both popular and unpopular points of view on controversial topics, especially questions concerning Israel and Palestine. There’s not much we can do about that, since we firmly believe that there’s no point in supporting a paper that censors information that advertisers might object to. But for the vast majority of potential advertisers who don’t have political objections t o our open-door policy it seems that Daily Planet advertising is a good opportunity. 

What does the Planet offer advertisers? 

It is the best way to reach readers from all over the world who think of the Berkeley area as an exciting destination for shopping, dining and entertainment. We have many readers who learn about Berkeley from reading the Planet on the Internet, and eventually show up here as tourists. And Bay Area businesses which want unique insider access to the East Bay’s fertile consumer base, in both flatlands and hill areas, advertise in the Planet. They appreciate the excellent demographic profile of Berkeley and the surrounding areas.  

Here’s why the Planet is unique: 

It’s the East Bay’s only locally published and independently owned newspaper. It serves not only Berkeley itself but the cities around it, including Albany, El Cerrito, Alameda, Richmond, Oakland, Emeryville and Piedmont. Many of our readers live, work or go to school in Berkeley, but the paper is distributed as far north as Point Richmond, and as far south as Oakland’s neighborhoods near Mills College. 

According to an official City of Berkeley survey, the Daily Planet has the highest readership percentage among Berkeley voters of any East Bay paper, and it is also a “mus t-read” for anyone who needs to know what’s going on in surrounding cities. Our own surveys strongly confirm this positioning.  

Because the paper offers in-depth political coverage and feature articles about the cities we serve, with comprehensive calend ars of civic and cultural events, readers keep the twice-weekly issues longer and read them more carefully than the “lite” dailies or entertainment weeklies. Our new East Bay Home and Real Estate section offers valuable service articles plus comprehensive listings. It is widely read both by would-be buyers and by homeowners, many of whom will eventually become for-sale listings.  

Increasingly, businesses from outside Berkeley are starting to appreciate our ability to attract sophisticated readers. Montcl air Village, a charming retail enclave in the Oakland Hills only minutes from Berkeley on Highway 13, has been a strong supporter of both our real estate section and our holiday shopping guide, for example.  

We’ve always said that “greater Berkeley” is a n attitude, a state of mind, and that greater Berkeley customers are to be found in all sorts of unexpected places. But perhaps this has something to do with the relative complacency exhibited by businesses located in Berkeley itself: “We don’t need to ad vertise, because our location says it all.” This might have been true in the past, but we note with sadness that sales tax revenue from downtown Berkeley seems to be taking a nosedive, according to a speaker at a Downtown Berkeley Association seminar rece ntly attended by our publisher. He quotes her as saying that the new apartments sprouting up downtown don’t always produce customers for every kind of store. They’re mainly bringing in young males looking to buy pizza, like her own son, she said. It’s possible that businesses looking for a different kind of customer would benefit from advertising in the Planet.  

Internet buying is often blamed for local business’s lost sales. That’s partly true, but the other side of the coin is that Berkeley businesses like Peet’s and Cody’s which are growing into chains and establishing Internet presence should be aware that our website gets thousands of hits every day, many from cities where they’d like to be attracting customers. 

Since the 1920s the news media have been supported by commercial advertisers, and there’s not much likelihood that this will change in the near future. No major papers are anywhere close to being supported by newsstand or subscription revenues, partly because the cost of collection exceeds the return. We’ve talked about trying some sort of MoveOn-like click-through web subscription, but most web-based publications still don’t break even. 

We continue to regard our advertisers as our principal partners in this enterprise, and we appreciate their support and participation. We believe that when their businesses succeed because the Daily Planet helps them find customers, we’ll succeed too.  

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