For Saturday 14 March, I have chosen a sample paper in the Irish Independent to look at how advertising affects how the paper lays out stories and also judge if these adverts have any affect on the reader now that they are more prominent due to falling revenues on the part of the print media.
Noticeably, the advertising begins to have an effect on page 6 of the paper, with an advert taking up proportionally half of the page and the two stories having to be written around it. This possibly affects the size of the pictures included in one story about Google Maps, as the advert is so big the story is squashed in the top of the page.
Underneath this is an education story about a union strike threatening Junior and Leaving Cert exams, which perhaps is restricted in the space it needs to explain the story because of the advertisement on page 6. However a glaring restrictment is page 7 in its entirety: for that is a full page colour advert for B&Q Ireland not remotely related to any news story within the previous or following pages. Another example of this is on page 9 as I turn the page, and an ad for the lottery takes up a good 80% of the page... which includes a lot of white space that could be used for more news stories.
The question I want to ask the most is almost self-explanatory when viewing pages 10 and 11 - two full pages of black and white advertisements for electronics and furniture that I personally think every reader in the country must skip once they spy that these two pages include no stories.
I must ask: do these ads have any effect at all, for the money the advertisers are paying out to launch a two page spread in a national newspaper... as opposed to a large single page ad that is at least within the peripheral vision of someone reading the news pieces. Is it worth actually including those two pages when readers will jsut skip over the pages (unless they see something they like).
Of course this is irrelevant for the newspaper owners - the amount of revenue they must be taking in from advertisers willing to fund a two page spread must be quite big indeed.
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