Is the Inquirer bilking taxpayers and the Commonwealth of PA?
If the judges stand their ground and demand a do-over election, it looks like another financial windfall for the state’s financially strapped newspapers. None of the newspapers, meanwhile, seem to be complaining.
(Editor’s note: to view an Excel spreadsheet of the 2016 newspaper ads charged to the state as mentioned in this article click here. To view 2014 newspaper invoices for these ads in pdf format click here. To view the actual advertisement mentioned in this article click here.)
The on-again, off-again attempt to change the state constitution to allow Pennsylvania judges to retire at age 75 has confused state voters, challenged the state constitution, and has already spawned at least one lawsuit.
But there’s one group that has done very well despite the turmoil for voters: the state’s newspapers.
Records say the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has paid state newspapers $2,601,914 to date to advertise the controversial constitutional change.
By far the lion’s share of that money, about 22 percent, has gone to only one newspaper: the Philadelphia Inquirer, for running both English and Spanish versions of the state’s ad in its pages.
The Inquirer arbitrarily charges the state $48,642 for each insertion of both the English and Spanish-language ads — for a total of $97,284. And this happened three times in 2014, and again in 2016.
That’s more than double what any other newspaper has received in ad revenue — and in many cases multiples more.
In 2014 and 2016, the Inquirer altogether raked in $583,705.32 of that $2.6 million total, according to state records.
But there are reasonable questions about the fairness of how this advertising money has been spent, and whether the Inquirer is overcharging the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for access to its declining readership.
Making matters worse, state newspapers, including the Inquirer, stand to gain another $1.3 million in advertising if the judges get their way and the retirement proposal is again placed on the ballot in November.
“The ballot proposal would need to be advertised again prior to the November 2016 election,” says Kaitlin Murphy, spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections and the ad spending.
Should the already-failed ballot proposal be relisted in November, Murphy tells me by email, “there will be a second round of advertising in August, September, and October. Essentially, it costs about $430,000 for each run.”
Since the 19th century, the Pennsylvania constitution has required the state buy two rounds of advertising “in at least two newspapers in every county” to advertise any constitutional amendment after the two required sessions the proposed amendments were voted on by the legislature.
Only then does the proposed change go to the voters at the ballot box.
The judges’ proposed retirement amendment was approved by the legislature in the 2014 session, and again in 2015.
Accordingly, records show the state paid the newspapers $1,284,619 to advertise the proposed change in 2014, and another $1,317,292.36 in the first months of 2016, in the run-up to this April’s primary election.
The measure was placed on the ballot for the April 26 state primary, but the legislature and courts in the last weeks before the vote attempted to pull the question from the ballot, and change the wording so that voters wouldn’t be informed that judges presently must retire at age 70.
But it was too late to physically remove the ballot question from the polling places, so a Commonwealth Court judge ruled the votes simply wouldn’t be counted.
Even so, confused state voters on April 26 defeated the retirement proposal 1,221,422 votes to 1,173,828 — or by 47,594 votes, about 51 to 49 percent.
Even though voters turned down the proposal this April 26, the judges and their GOP water carriers in the legislature want a constitutionally questionable do-over in the November election, which would force the state to buy yet another round of ads from the state’s newspapers.
The state Senate’s Democratic caucus has challenged the re-vote in court.
But if the courts stand their ground and demand a do-over, it looks like another financial windfall for the state’s financially strapped newspapers.
None of the newspapers, meanwhile, seem to be complaining.
I’ve yet to see a single editorial criticizing this process in any state newspaper — even while most of these newspapers are getting a windfall in ad dollars from the state.
On the face of it, all this is bad enough.
But when you look closely at the ad dollars charged by the newspapers to run the state’s ads — particularly what the Inquirer is charging — reasonable questions start to pile up.
On the face of it, the $583,705 charged by the Inquirer for running the state’s ads is certainly a large sum that would substantially help any business’s bottom line.
How large?
The $583,705 from the state is enough to pay the salaries of 20 Inky staffers making $29,185 a year, for one year.
So the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is certainly subsidizing the editorial operations of the Inquirer in a big way.
But when you look deeper at the Inquirer’s rapidly declining circulation numbers, and measure what the Inquirer is charging compared to what other newspapers charge the state for their papers’ advertising, even more questions pop up.
The Inquirer and its ever-changing parade of owners have been in and out of bankruptcy proceedings in the last decade. The paper, under new ownership, was forced to sell it landmark high-rise office tower in downtown Philadelphia, once known as the “Tower of Truth.” The troubled newspaper is now headquartered in a former Strawbridge & Clothier department store, now affectionately referred to in the trade as “Dad’s Basement.”
Moreover, as most of us know, the Inquirer’s readership has been precipitously declining for years.
An October 2014 Philadelphia Magazine article relates, “The Inky’s average Sunday print circulation for the six month period that ended September 30th (2014) was 312,197, down 12,000 copies a week from the last report in March (2014), and off by roughly 18,000 copies a week from the same report a year ago….
“The paper’s average Monday through Friday circulation also slid to 158,546 copies per day, off about 8,000 copies a day from the 166,000 copies a day sold in March, and about a 15,000-a-day drop from September 2013,” Philly Mag writes.
So the Inquirer is dropping (charitably) about 10 percent of its readership a year — that we know about.
(Just what are the Inquirer’s current circulation numbers? You’d have better luck trying to find the vital signs of a dying old soldier in a Veterans Affairs hospital. No one at the Inquirer has yet answered my questions — the phone rings and rings, and no one answers.)
But while the Inquirer’s readership presumably has dropped 20 percent in the two years from 2014 to 2016, the troubled newspaper continued to charge the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania the same amount — $48,642 — per ad.
And the Inquirer isn’t even running the ads in its Sunday edition, which presumably has about twice the readership. (The last ad run in the Inquirer appeared on January 21, 2016 — a Thursday.)
In comparison, the Harrisburg Patriot-News, which ranked 16th in the state ad money bonanza, charged the commonwealth only $5,964 for each ad insertion it printed in its pages.
A representative of the Patriot-News tells me that newspaper prints 35,000 copies on Tuesdays, and 42,000 on Thursdays.
The state’s last election ad that ran in the Harrisburg Patriot appeared on January 21, 2016 (a Thursday), in 42,000 copies for a cost of almost $6,000. That’s a cost of about 14 cents a reader. ($5,964 ÷ 42,000 = 0.142.)
But, for the same ad, the Inquirer charges $48,642 to appear in (at most) 158,546 copies of its papers (and certainly thousands of copies less). That works out to more than 30 cents a reader. ($48,642 ÷ 158,546 = 0.306.)
So the Philadelphia Inquirer is charging double what other newspapers are charging the state to reach the same number of readers.
In some cases, the Inquirer is charging much more than that.
Is the Inquirer ripping off the state, and the taxpayers of Pennsylvania, by overcharging for its advertising?
It wouldn’t be the first time it was accused of overcharging.
In 2014, the Inquirer took flak for attempting to overcharge for an ad that writer Elie Wiesel wanted to run.
“While the London Times declined to run the Elie Wiesel ad for reasons of community standards, the Philadelphia Inquirer failed to land the ad for a very different — and very American — reason: cash,” complained the New York Observer.
“The Inquirer, whose finances have been decimated along with the entire industry, demanded $60,000 to run the ad. According to the media firm that placed the ad for Jewish Values Network, that’s exactly the same figure that the New York Times charged, while offering many times the circulation and the prestige of being the nation’s paper of record.
“The age of digital circulation and the fact that the Inquirer publishes under a Joint Operating Agreement with its sister/rival the Philadelphia Daily News makes apples-to-apples numbers hard to come by. But the official referee of newspaper circulation, Audited Media, lists the print circulation of the Times at 1,254,506 and the Inquirer at 362,752. With less than 1/3 the audience, it is perhaps surprising that the Inky thought it could command an equal page rate. (It should be noted that the Times rate of $60,000 for a full page is only for its ‘standby rate,’ which means they won’t guarantee that it runs on the particular requested day, only that it runs.)
“Confronted with this disparity, the Inquirer agreed to cut its price to $50,000 — still a way higher price-per-reader than the Times, a source with knowledge of the Jewish Values Network’s ad-buying practices told the Observer. The media firm countered with $30,000 — half the money for about a quarter as many readers. The Inquirer declined.”
It’s interesting to note that the $50,000 demanded by the Inquirer for the Wiesel ad is roughly the same amount as the $48,642 the paper demands the state repeatedly pay for its judicial retirement ad placement.
The Inquirer, historically, has been caught in other advertising scandals related to legal advertising.
In 1891, Pennsylvania Attorney General William Hensel, himself the publisher of the Lancaster Intelligencer, discovered the Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers had bribed public officials to get legal advertising. Part of that scandal involved the placement of foreign-language ads, as today.
In that 1891 incident, the Inquirer was forced to repay what it had stolen from public coffers.
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Here’s a list of the top 36 winners of the state Judicial Retirement newspaper ad bonanza. These are the totals each newspaper received from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for ads run in 2014 and 2016.
Note that four of these papers (the Inquirer, the Allentown Call, the Reading Eagle and the Lehigh Valley Press) were paid to run state ads in both English and Spanish. Source: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and Mansi Media.
There are over 150 entries; these are the top 36. For comparison, we’ve added the bottom three newspapers as well.
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER (English & Spanish) – $583,705.32
PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE – $116,739.09
PHILADELPHIA TRIBUNE – $115,914.63
ALLENTOWN MORNING CALL (English & Spanish) – $85,857.78
ERIE TIMES-NEWS – $50,168.19
READING EAGLE (English & Spanish) – $48,355.2
LANCASTER INTELLIGENCER NEW ERA – $46,395.72
GREENSBURG TRIBUNE-REVIEW – $44,446.39
YORK RECORD DISPATCH SUNDAY NEWS – $41,216.49
SCRANTON TIMES-TRIBUNE – $38,029.14
HARRISBURG PATRIOT NEWS – $36,925.83
OIL CITY DERRICK-FRANKLIN NEWS /
HERALD-CLARION NEWS – $36,197.28
JOHNSTOWN TRIBUNE DEMOCRAT – $36,184.5
LEHIGH VALLEY PRESS GROUP (English & Spanish) – $35,379.72
WILKES BARRE TIMES LEADER – $35,217.57
ALTOONA MIRROR – $32,972.4
UNIONTOWN HERALD-STANDARD – $32,844.69
BUCKS COUNTY COURIER – $32,252.4
PHILADELPHIA AL DIA – $31,198.59
BEAVER COUNTY TIMES – $30,117.78
WASHINGTON OBSERVER-REPORTER – $28,858.74
CENTRE DAILY TIMES – $26,470.8
SHARON HERALD – $26,174.34
WILKES BARRE CITIZENS VOICE – $24,029.28
BLOOMSBURG PRESS-ENTERPRISE- $23,539.05
DOYLESTOWN INTELLIGENCER- $23,252.4
EASTON EXPRESS-TIMES – $22,294.98
SAXTON BROAD TOP BULLETIN – $20,904.57
NEW CASTLE NEWS – $19,424.16
POTTSVILLE REPUBLICAN HERALD- $19,269.18
LEBANON DAILY NEWS – $17,705.52
DCNN – NEWS OF DELAWARE COUNTY – $17,067.6
CARLISLE SENTINEL – $17,716.86
HANOVER EVENING SUN – $16,341.39
MEYERSDALE NEW REPUBLIC – $16,315.92
NEW PITTSBURGH COURIER – $9,413.19
Newspapers receiving the least:
MONTROSE SUSQUEHANNA COUNTY / – $3,525.75
INDEPENDENT
TIONESTA FOREST PRESS – $3,237.12
ORBISONIA VALLEY LOG – $3,182.4
