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newspapers collecting personal information on their readers
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Date: Sat, 15 Jul 95 11:16 PDT From: listserv@vortex.com (Mailing List Server)
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PRIVACY Forum Digest Friday, 7 July 1995 Volume 04 : Issue 15
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Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 10:53:18 PST
From:
Privacy Forum has frequently cast a worried eye over the direct mail industry but has rarely looked at the commercial media that have greater potential to gather information about citizens-- newspapers and magazines. PUBLISHERS FIND GOLD IN DATABASES, Advertising Age has announced. Outside marketing circles, however, the discovery is little noted. The nuggets here are information about the reader, especially the subscriber's name and address. There is a brisk trade in these lists. Your name on the subscription record of an upscale magazine is worth a dime or two, every time it is sold. A single magazine may sell your name twenty-five times a year. Many of the most respected American magazines, such as the Atlantic and the New Yorker, hawk reader's names in the trade press. Names are not in short supply. Conde Nast has collected eleven million names; Times Mirror had fifteen million; Hearst had fifty million; Meredith had fifty-six million; and Reader's Digest had data on line for one hundred million people, worldwide. Beyond the bare facts of subscription, the database gold mine that the press is staking out consists of information that the public may never have of thought of as a commodity: their own names when they write letters to the editor or pay for their subscription with a credit card; births, deaths, marriages and divorces that come into the news; job switches; degrees and licenses that people have earned; donations to local events and charities. Seen this way, a great deal of local news is saleable data that marketers would like to have. Crime reports, for instance, can become names and addresses of people who will be good customers for burglar alarms and security lights.
List building is a new imperative of the newspaper business. The Cowles Publishing Company in Spokane, Washington has pioneered in segmenting its readers. Thanks to contests, the daily paper knows who owns dogs and who has young children (they were flushed out in a drawing for circus tickets). In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the Gazette's MediaStar software allows reporters to use customer profiles in writing stories and the marketing staff to use news items in the search for more customers. With a click on a desktop computer, any street in Cedar Rapids can be summoned up, and every dwelling will glow with a color that reveals the resident's social and economic position. The Washington Post, like other papers with the CityLine audiotex, gives information to readers for free and in return builds a valuable database. The names and numbers of callers with specific interests--stock quotes, skiing conditions, sports scores--are used in the paper's own promotions and sold to direct mail entrepreneur. The trade journal Editor & Publisher has noted that "when readers call a phone number for a survey of information, it gives newspapers an unprecedented opportunity to capture information about who those might be and what the key might be to their wants and desires." This is truly uncharted territory for journalism. What will happen when papers have comprehensive, detailed databases on their community and can trade this information for good will--a process that has begun. Which charities, which religions, which political interest groups will be favored with this information? Citizens may feel that their voluntary association is being guided by the press. With the integration of news and marketing, the press will know more than anybody else about everyone's business. And journalists may also gain the suspicion that goes with comprehensive knowledge. The press will have the public relations problem of credit agencies, motor vehicle registries, and tax collectors. I hope, too, that the press will get critical attention from people who contribute to Privacy Forum. The much-watched Direct Marketers, after all, have a published ethical code and field questions about what they are up to. The American press has no such industry code for list building and rarely lets readers in on the secret of what it is doing with their names. This challenge to privacy is discussed more fully, with a literature review, in the book Oxford University Press will publish this fall: News for All: America's Coming of Age with the Press (ISBN 0-19-506454-2). I would be glad to hear from other investigators of this marketing trend in American journalism.
Thomas C. Leonard Assoc. Dean, Graduate School of Journalism University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-5860
Fax (510) 643-9136 Tel (510) 642-8867 Leonard@Rosebud.Berkeley.Edu
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End of PRIVACY Forum Digest 04.15
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