Monday, April 20, 2009
Features | Papers seeking middle-aged women?
(Updated at 1:32 a.m. ET.) Gannett is tinkering with its features-news coverage, adding niche websites devoted to the environment and to health care. Now, I hear Corporate may want some papers to focus on a new and possibly lucrative market: middle-aged female consumers. If true, that market could be a natural extension of the Moms Like Me franchise. And it comes when marketers, battling slow times, are focusing more on selling to older shoppers.
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Why isn't Gannett in a pickle — since they have laid off most of the older women in their organization. If you're over 45 you can't even work on a Gannett project that targets people younger than you. For some unknown reason they think only young people have bright ideas. I have to chuckle though, because I'm the one that keeps winning the awards, not the younger ones. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it!
ReplyDeleteGet real!
ReplyDeleteGannett used to have that demographic sewed. We used to write stories about shopping, new products and services, RECIPES and health/wellness. Throw in some religion coverage, a feature story and profile and there you have it -- again.
But for the longest time, corporate pulled "feature" sections away from women's interests. Many of us thought it was wrong at the time and we're going to say WE TOLD YOU SO if they bring it back.
Another product in search of an audience. Yeahoo. Let me cheer.
ReplyDelete"Middle-aged women" covers a HUGE range of people. You've got stay-at-home moms, career women, women re-entering the workforce after staying at home, part-time workers, homeschool moms, women without children at all ...
I still wish good luck to the morons. At least they're trying something. It's stupid, but they're trying.
Looks like the Federal Trade Commission is about to put a crimp into how sites like Moms operate. The FTC says people who are paid to post and promote should identify themselves as being paid. So all those GCI employees working on Moms sites need to identify themselves as employees and paid shills or else Gannett will be hit with fraudulent advertising judgements.
ReplyDeleteLike the several middle-aged women they laid off at my paper in December?
ReplyDeleteCougars Like Me (with expendable income for our dwindling advertisers).
ReplyDeleteMILFs like me?
ReplyDeleteGranted, there would be an external name that's better, but obviously we want the slightly older moms who still think they got it going on and will spend to keep it up.
The Real Housewives of Sheboygan County.
This company has bent overboards to piss off middle-aged readers of both sexes. The emphasis on mindless features of trendy clothes, campus life, top of the pops stars, and both college and high school sports has been the hallmark of GCI coverage. So now they are going to after aging baby boomers? Gimme a break. I can't blame them for deciding it is time to focus on their core audience -- particularly since younger generations want nothing to do with fuddy-duddy newspapers or graphically-impaired newspaper sites -- but it is all far too late.
ReplyDeleteThey are throwing a whole bunch of things against the wall, and looking to see if any stick. But like the green site, they aren't devoting the necessary resources and are relying on stuff produced by a staff already stretched to the point they cannot do their regular jobs.
ReplyDeleteIf they do this, I hope they at least pick content that is actually interesting to middle-aged women. Fluff is not going to cut it. Just doing the same-old same-old (fashion, shopping, exercise etc.) geared to older women's styles is not going to help. Middle-aged women will see right through this. But I like the idea of a moms-like-me style web site. That could really be a hit!
ReplyDeleteAbout time they did something to shore up the audience that reads newspapers, IMHO. We are fast losing circulation in the baby boomer ranks, and if they go there is nothing else for us out there.
ReplyDeleteisn't it ironic, doncha think? after a decade of forcing "over-the-hill" 40-60-somethings to write for teeny-bops and gen ys, now they'll force the latter to write for the former, cuz that's all they've got left for staff.
ReplyDeletetoo bad it took them so long to realize that the core demographic for newspapers is 30-and-up people with jobs, kids, mortgages and LIVES, not teens and 20s who want everything online and have to grow up a few years before they'll care about tax rates and grocery coupons.
back in the day, back before gannett bought what had been a fairly good paper and a pretty good employer, we aimed to have something every day that appealed to everyone old enough to read -- a variety of comics for all ages, recipes for housewives, job tips for the employed and the job-seeking, LOCAL music and movie reviews for the teens-30somethings, sports for males (and, increasingly for females) of all ages, etc.
now, there's almost nuthin for nobody and we wonder where the readers went. but at least what's online is incredibly poorly designed.
on the bright side, we're killing fewer trees . . .
What a great idea -- how about adding work out of the house moms?
ReplyDeleteI read about a case in Wisconsin where a stay at home mom advertised her services on Craigslist and had a regular clientele. She turned tricks during the day while hubby was at work and their child was in school.
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ReplyDeleteThe irony of all this is rich. As others have noted, many of the laid-off employees were middle-aged, and a good portion were women. Our jobs are now being done by 20-somethings at half the pay we got, and half the life experience, knowledge, etc.
ReplyDeleteI no longer get the daily Phoenix rag, because it holds no interest for me. And, being unemployed (eight months now), I don't want to waste the money.
All of this is so frustrating and demoralizing. I--and many of my age group--have said all along: Just put out a good newspaper that covers the issues in the community and provides NEWS and you will have readers. Seems like that way of thinking is coming back into fashion. But it is probably too late.
It's not just middle-aged women. A big part of the latest demographic focus is specifically on baby boomers of all stripes — including the tail end of the generation. And women are part of that, too. If they also happen to be in the wealthy part of the local audience, double bonus because they're in two of the target circles.
ReplyDeleteIs that like Circles of Life, 12:30?
ReplyDeleteFunny how Gannett continues to target middle-aged women when its own market research has shown that those women are too busy to read news stories in print or on the Web. The market research has long shown that middle-aged men drive readership, mainly through sports and hard news. But Gannett gave up the bird in the hand in its vain pursuit of the two in the bush. Only after driving away a generation of replacement readers will it acknowledge its mistake.
ReplyDelete5:09 PM, it has nothing to do drawing middle-aged women READERS. It has everything to do with delivering middle-aged women CONSUMERS to the advertisers. This is the audience that is the primary household spender -- and always has been.
ReplyDelete... Reinventing the wheel, indeed.
And I can't help but laugh, because my paper didn't even carry a brief on the Ledbetter bill, let alone an editorial supporting it.
I'll reiterate that if these bozos think they'll just write fluff about the church women's circles, they still won't deliver to the advertisers. I'll bet most editors assign exactly that kind of crap and continue to avoid issues that matter to women.
We're not stupid, but they laid most of us off as if we were.
Gee, then why didn't the brainiacs at Gannett try to KEEP the very women on their staffs who could have best led this initiative??
ReplyDeleteIdiots.
5:09 p.n. very good points, although at my site, the advertisers beg not to be on the sports pages.
ReplyDeleteHa! Pick me up from the floor.
ReplyDeleteI'm a 49-year-old woman who was laid off in December after spending her career developing, growing and editing award-winning features sections (only the most recent a Gannett one) across the country. Each of those sections had depth, humor, humility and didn't pander to the men and women of all ages who read them. Over the past few years I've watched those same sections be dismantled and disenfranchised and dissed by top management which doesn't have a clue what engaged readers want from their features sections. This most recent Gannett announcement makes me laugh out loud.
I'm so glad to be out and now working on something that I am actually proud of.