Mort Zuckerman’s weapons in the fight for print: optimism and $150 million presses.
The Daily News owner has invested in “advanced high-speed color presses,” reports the Times. This is a bold statement of faith in the medium, an appeal to readers’ investment in the paper as a physical object, and, most importantly, a lure to advertisers:
“It pops much better than before,” said Paul Chapman, vice chairman and president of ABC Carpet and Home, whose ads in The Daily News now clearly show the multicolored patterns of Middle Eastern rugs. At other papers, “you can’t get the detail we’re getting now with The Daily News.”
“We advertised before with them, but we did not get nearly the same response from the customer,” he said, adding that his company had doubled the number of its ads in The Daily News since the new presses started turning.
Sleepy’s, the mattress store chain, recently bought an ad in the paper’s weekend leisure section, Your New York, that spread across two pages with an irregular shape, giving the impression of being entwined with the article next to it – a layout that would have been much harder to do with the old presses.
Whither Sleepy’s? This is the question of news as we know it.