Not every free tabloid out there is a success, a point hammered home rather overtly by the story of Orange, a freebie in the Tampa area which closed up shop last week after just six months on the street. The paper’s publishers claim otherwise, but a dust-up involving an article making use of a rather impolitic slang term for the female reproductive area most likely didn’t help.
Media General, which also owns the Tampa Tribune and WFLA-Ch. 8, shuttered the tabloid last week after six months of publication, citing a “failure to resonate with advertisers and readers.”
But [Orange editor Mitzi] Gordon says the incident with the vulgarity was what prompted the company to abandon a project it never seemed to fully support.
“I felt that I was poorly managed and overworked, and made the best decision I could at the time,” said Gordon, 30, who noted the tabloid had published a four-letter vulgarity referring to sex several times without incident.
Though Orange fell short of its goal to have half its pages filled by advertising each week, with a budget planned for 18 months, Gordon said she hoped to have more time to develop the tabloid.
“We’re in a saturated market … aimed at a youthful audience that’s desensitized to a lot,” she added, saying that Orange publisher Carla Floyd suggested she could use the same language featured in the free, Tampa-based weekly tabloid Creative Loafing. “They told me to be different, stop trying to fit in. I did it, and they didn’t like it.”
The article also notes that there were already a number of free papers in the Tampa area, something that (for example) Express did not really face when it started in 2003. Of course, I believe the Post also had a much longer timeframe in mind for the paper than 18 months, which really doesn’t seem like a long enough commitment for this kind of venture; I wonder if that timeframe was also communicated to potential advertisers, and if so whether that contributed to any reluctance to cough up ad dollars. I hope it doesn’t mean Media General is just giving up on the idea, though they might want to take a slightly different approach next time.
(via Romenesko)
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