Advertiser pressure on daily newspapers: a survey of advertising sales executives.

With declining newspaper circulation and increasing intermedia competition for advertising dollars, ad sales departments at newspapers experience rising pressure from advertisers. Major advertisers, such as car dealers and realtors, often attempt to control news stories and threaten to withdraw advertising over unfavorable coverage (Lesly 1991; Singer 1991; Williams 1992). Advertisers' inappropriate influences are not limited to small local newspapers. In 1999, the Los Angeles Times engaged in an improper deal of splitting $2 million in advertising revenue with the Staples Center for a special edition of the Sunday magazine (McLellan 2002). The issue was devoted exclusively to the opening of the center in downtown Los Angeles and the news editorial department was reportedly not informed of the unethical deal until other newspapers condemned it publicly (Smith 1999).

As advertising ethics continues to be an important mainstream topic in advertising research (Hyman, Tansey, and Clark 1994), the business of advertising sales is an area calling for a thorough ethical assessment. At a time when the wall between the news and business interests of the newspaper industry appears to be crumbling, it is important to understand the nature of ethical sensitivity and the values held by those in advertising sales departments. Little scholarly attention has been paid to how advertising sales executives face, approach, and deal with ethical issues when they arise. Much of the literature has taken the profit motive of the advertising sales department as a given, leaving aside the question of how those in the department perceive their role and how they manage to balance business pressures and journalism values.

The purpose of this study is to examine how advertising sales directors, who serve in an interface role between a news editorial department and advertisers, handle external demands to influence the reporting of the news. In previous studies, scholars have surveyed newspaper editors (Howland 1989; Soley and Craig 1992), writers (Hays and Reisner 1990), and network correspondents (Price 2003) about the perceived pressures from advertisers. Because of their direct contact with advertisers, those in ad departments possess firsthand knowledge of advertisers' demands. To the public, "battles with advertisers" are often not seen (Cranberg 1993, p. 13). Indeed, newspapers in a competitive situation try to keep the ethical problems involving ad sales out of the public eye (Cranberg 1993).

We provide four different scenarios in terms of severity and types of ethical issues, and test how advertising directors react differently to each situation. To understand the circumstances under which advertising directors are more willing to compromise the integrity of news, this study considers two key characteristics of newspaper companies: circulation size and ownership type. Research on U.S. newspapers suggests that the circulation size and ownership type are key factors affecting their goals and behaviors (Demers 1998). We first document growing advertiser pressure on news content, followed by the literature on the ambiguous role of advertising directors as boundary spanners.

ADVERTISER INFLUENCE ON NEWS CONTENT

Today more than ever, newspaper journalism is geared toward supporting the newspaper's advertising department. Ad sales executives serve on strategy committees, along with editors and writers, to determine what readers want and how to attract advertisers (Risser 2000). Here is how Ken Doctor (1995), managing editor of the St. Paul Pioneer-Press, described the changing business environment of the 1990s: "We began to notice that the way we do business is archaic. An assembly-line operation ... still dominates.... Everything was being determined by a compartmentalized, departmental system that had outgrown its usefulness" (p. 7). By the mid-1990s, newspaper managers began disassembling the departmental system. In 1997, the Los Angeles Times reorganized its newsroom by teaming section editors with business partners, creating an independent business unit (Rosenstiel 1997). Regarding this market-oriented structure, observers at the Los Angeles Times stated, "If a section can't pay its way by attracting advertising revenue, it should at least justify itself by attracting readers" (Rosenstiel 1997, p. A19). This integration of marketing executives into editorial management has been described as "blowing up the wall" between the business side and the editorial side of newspapers (Shepard 1997, p. 164).

Many scholars and journalists have viewed this sort of integration of the marketing function as a threat to quality journalism (Davis 1996; Meyer 1995; Stein 1997; Underwood 1998). A survey of 25 newsroom managers showed that changes in the newspaper business lead to a more market-driven emphasis, at the expense of journalism values (Gade 2002). Leo Wolinsky, managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, once said: "Money is always the first thing we talk about. The readers are always the last thing we talk about" (Risser 2000, p. 26). When the Los Angeles Times published a 168-page Sunday magazine supplement about the Staples Center, it was harshly criticized for having crossed the ethical line (McLellan 2002). Although most newspapers may not engage in such direct advertiser influence, critics agree that killing or softening potential stories to avoid offending an advertiser may be more widespread, as is the practice of developing stories to please an advertiser.