Shoppers, Penneysavers
Whatever you call them, shoppers, pennysavers, free sheets, etc., these free papers containing mostly, if not all, advertising are certainly major contenders in the fight for advertisers' money. The huge advantage of these newspapers is that they typically are delivered to every home in the area in which they circulate. This total coverage of the market is sometimes called TMC, which stands for total market coverage. The advantage of total market coverage is obvious; if you want to reach everybody, or so the argument goes, then put an ad in a shopper and it'll get to every home in the area.

Another big advantage shoppers have is their low rates. Because there's little or no editorial in shoppers, there's no editorial staff to pay. At least part of this enormous savings is passed on to the advertiser, providing total coverage cheap. Although this sounds like a huge advantage, others will argue that you get what you pay for.

Sure, you're saving money, but you're sacrificing a lot. People who compete with shoppers like to point out that unlike most dailies and weeklies, subscriptions to shoppers aren't paid for or even requested in most cases. Which means some people will throw it away without even looking at it. Others, who might be willing to read it if it had any editorial value, will throw it away as well. Others will question how legitimate the circulation figures they quote really are.

This is for two reasons. First, some feel that a shopper's delivery system is not as reliable as it should be. Almost every newspaper I ever worked for has the same story circulating around its advertising department. Invariably, a friend of a friend saw a huge bundle of the area's shoppers in a dumpster behind a supermarket. The assumption was that one of the shopper's delivery people got tired of delivering papers that day, so just threw them away when nobody was looking and knocked off early. Shoppers will counter with the fact that they no longer use schoolchildren to deliver their newspapers, instead they opt for what we call adult carriers, who are supposed to be more efficient and reliable. Whatever the arguments for why a shopper really doesn't reach the amount of people it claims, there is a simple way for shoppers to avoid this problem--get an audit.

Most dailies and weeklies are audited, meaning they bring people from the outside into the newspaper and they check everything out and certify that the circulation the newspaper claims is true. Many advertising agencies and large accounts won't even advertise in a product that hasn't been audited. Some Shoppers use these audit companies, many others don't. So see if you can get your hands on your audit statement for your newspaper and find out about what your competitors have.

Unfortunately, the anti-shopper campaign doesn't stop there. Besides the quantity of readers being questioned, some question the quality of the readers. There's a general feeling that the readers have less desirable demographics--lower incomes, less expendable incomes. While it does make sense that the people who actually pick up a shopper full of ads are more bargain-oriented perhaps because they have lower expendable income, still, proving it might be another issue. In fact, we worked with a large shopper group in one area who's readership study showed that they did indeed reach a good amount of higher income readers.

Summary
The bottom line is, no matter what type of newspaper you work for, a daily or weekly newspaper or a shopper, if there are advertisers running already with your newspaper and happy, then most likely you've got a pretty good newspaper. And although you can say negative things about any competitor, no matter how good they are, it's going to be your job to show them that you can make them money if they run with you.