Former DNAInfo owner Joe Ricketts may or may not be a coward, but Bill de Blasio is stingy.
Let me explain.
Ricketts, like many billionaires that made their money in other business sectors, caught the media mogul bug, and saw a market in covering hyper-local community news. So in 2009, he began investing untold millions starting with hiring top local reporters and promising journalism grads in Chicago and New York to report local news.
While I’m not privy to what they were paid, I would bet he paid them considerably above the going rate for what journalists get covering local news. I’m also guessing his business model figured to invest heavily in the journalism side, take over the local market and then advertising would follow suit.
Now I myself who started in this sector with a paper route as a 10-year old, then sold subscriptions to a local weekly – both in the Chicago area – then becoming a circulation director and truck driver delivering publications to newsstands in NYC for seven years, owning my own weekly in upstate New York and being both a staff reporter and freelancer for the past 30 years, and now owning KingsCountyPolitics.com (KCP), would venture this guess: That strategy model was highly flawed.
Advertising never materialized, and billionaire or not, nobody likes throwing out good money after bad. So when reporters voted to unionize it was something of a last straw, and Ricketts threw in the towel, giving all the reporters a pretty nice severance package.
This prompted the following Tweet from de Blasio: “Joe Ricketts is a coward. He wouldn’t last a minute under the intrepid scrutiny of the reporters he employed. What a loss for our city.”
The problem with de Blasio is he raised about $9.5 million for his re-election campaign including $3,5 million in local taxpayer public financing money, and didn’t take out one ad with local media.
Nothing. Nada. Not in black publications like Our Time Press and Amsterdam News. Not in DNAinfo, the Bklyner, BKReader, The Brooklyn Paper, and certainly not with KCP.
What de Blasio did spend on was untold amounts of digital advertising with Facebook, Google and Twitter – all media outlets now being criticized for allowing ‘Fake News” or outside entities such as the Russians to influence elections.
And for readers that don’t know, and who happen to see a de Blasio ad pop up on their local news site, be aware that these ads have little aqua-colored checks in the corner denoting it’s a Google ad and the local media outlet is getting pennies for it.
Now compare this to Public Advocate Letitia James, Republican Mayoral candidate Nicole Malliotakis and a host of local City Council members including Laurie Cumbo, Mark Treger, Chaim Deutsch and Mathieu Eugene. Like de Blasio they each took ads out with Google, etc., but unlike the mayor, they each also made sure that the local media – both big and small – got a taste of the public financing action.
James in particular made sure almost all the local media outlets got a taste.
It’s called taking care of your own. And advertising locally during the election season is something every former mayor has done since I first came to NYC in 1980. Part of that is messaging strategy, but it’s also because these electeds understand that local media employs local people, and you’ve got to spread the wealth around.
For an elected official such as de Blasio to not spend any money with the local digital media violates the following unwritten law that every business/entrepreneur from Ricketts down to the neighborhood hustler on the street understands.
It’s called the “Everybody’s got to eat” law.
De Blasio may or may not be a progressive, but if he doesn’t understand that law something is wrong.
