Chasing Ads and Readers Not a New Problem

Newspapers today are faced with finding ways to replace revenue lost from rapidly declining advertising and subscriptions. Newspaper classified advertising alone, which accounted for about 40 percent of newspaper industry ad revenue in 2000, had dropped 77 percent by 2012.

On Alabama’s early frontier, The Mobile Register faced a similar problem. Not with replacing lost revenue, but with finding it in the first place.

In 1820, Mobile County had a total population of only 2,672 people, and 836 of those were slaves. That wasn’t much of an advertising or subscription base.

There were businessmen who wanted to buy ads and subscriptions, but the problem was that there just wasn’t much hard money to do so.

The shortage of cash on the frontier forced the Register to adopt a system of credit that often brought it grief.

The newspaper made frequent calls on its subscribers and advertisers to pay what they owed. It issued calls so frequently, in fact, that customers often didn’t take the newspaper seriously. “Lest our patrons should suspect it to be the case with us,” the Register said in 1822, “we assure them, ‘in right good earnest,’ that we are really in want of funds.”

To make ends meet the Register found other ways of making money.

An important source was job printing. The job office printed bill heads, bills of lading, checks, dray receipts, tickets, circulars, cards, notes, insurance policies, labels, handbills, posters, wedding invitations, books, pamphlets and all the forms of paperwork needed in business and society.

During election campaigns, the presses ran almost constantly to print campaign materials. For lawyers, the job shop published and sold a digest of city ordinances.

From the earliest days of the town, businessmen needed a place to gather to smoke and exchange news of ship sailings, cargoes and distant markets. At first, hotel lobbies, the post office and saloons filled the need. The Register and other newspapers soon began to provide more accommodating quarters called reading rooms.

For a subscription fee of about $10 a year, the Register supplied businessmen with newspapers from around the country and from abroad, as well as maps, charts, periodicals, books, shipping lists and prices current (market reports) from the principal markets. Furniture and tables provided businessmen a comfortable place of examining the materials.

In our digital age, The Mobile Register won’t be producing a variety of print products to find more revenue. Just how the Register and other newspapers ultimately will solve their revenue problems can’t be predicted, but there’s no question that it is going to be fascinating to watch.