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Register Takes Aim at Advocate
Will launch free weekly for 18-to-34s in March
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Business New Haven
2/2/2004
By: BNH
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On March 3 the New Haven Register will debut a free weekly publication known as PLAY, targeted to 18- to 34-year-old readers.
PLAY's editor is 29-year-old Jonathan Cooper, most recently executive editor of Register sibling the New Britain Herald, both owned by the Trenton, N.J.-based Journal Register Co.
Cooper says the idea for a "lifestyle" publication for younger readers first surfaced some eight months ago.
"After pushing lots of ideas around, we concluded that greater New Haven could easily sustain this type of publication - that there was a need for something that was an enjoyable read that was lifestyle-oriented but didn't necessarily have a political view or political slant. That would contrast it with its principal competitor, the free weekly New Haven Advocate, which wears its left-of-center sympathies proudly on its sleeve.
Cooper adds that "There has definitely been interest not just from readers but from the advertising community as well."
As for PLAY's editorial content, Cooper draws a comparison with the TV hit Seinfeld: "It will be about everything but it will be about nothing. Whatever people are talking about - movies, dating relationships, just about anything that's going on in greater New Haven that is impacting the lives of 18- to 34-year-olds."
The obvious question: Is this a move by the Register to muscle in on the Advocate readers and advertisers?
"A lot of people have asked that question," Cooper says. "But I don't think we're looking at it as a direct competitor to the Advocate. We looking at this as an underserved market in our community."
For his part, New Haven Advocate Acting Publisher Francis J. Zankowski says he isn't too worried about the competition.
"For active 18- to 34-year-olds, the Advocate has been and is the primary source for what's happening and where to go for 29 years," says Zankowski. "I don't expect that to change."
Zankowski notes that a number of daily newspaper companies have attempted to muscle in on the so-called alternative newsweeklies, though none in his view have been successful.
"This follows a plan of many daily newspapers across the country to follow the free distribution system that alternative newsweeklies created" in the late 1960s and '70s, he says. The Advocate and papers like it are distributed free to readers at retail locations and free boxes throughout the paper's service area. That means that all of the Advocate's revenues - which Zankowski says total just under $3 million annually - derive from the sale of display and classified advertising.
"We call these 'faux alternatives,'" says Zankowski. "A faux alternative simply doesn't have the edge or the immediacy that a real alternative does have."
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