BACK BAY — I put a note about this on social media but figured I should place it here, too.
Thanks to someone holding it up during a City Council meeting, folks (even non-readers) know we already have a political ad running in the print edition of the paper.
They were displeased about this, but at least they’re reading.
Yes, we accept political ads. They help us pay for news gathering, and they usually cover the cost of our voter guide, which is time-consuming to assemble and costly to print and deliver.
We accept these ads as long as they meet our ad standards. Here’s a link to those guidelines.
The big change this year is that we are no longer accepting any ticket ads unless one entity pays for the ad and it is marked to show who specifically paid for it. Our rates are really low, and it just got a little silly last time dealing with multiple campaigns on one little ad.
I recommend that any campaign that wants to advertise should please book dates as soon as possible. We will have limited space this year, especially once September rolls around. Ads are first come, first serve. Additionally, all campaigns pay the same rate for like ads.
There will be limited space especially in the voter guide issue planned for early September because I really don’t want to split the local Q&As into two editions. There are an awful lot of candidates this year, and I want to include all of them and information about the new local voting system in the same edition. That’s going to eat up a lot of pages, and we can only go so big before the printer yells at me.
If you want to be in that edition, please reach me by email or call (757) 502-5393 sooner rather than later so I can plan to include those ads. We will offer every candidate on the ballot in Virginia Beach an opportunity to answer the Q&A in their own words, and we’ll print up a ton of those papers. There is no cost to the campaigns, and the newspaper and I never make endorsements of any candidate. That’s one of my favorite papers to do every year, and readers seem to value it as a resource. I think it’s especially important with this year’s changes.
We do not put political ads on the front. Those positions are not available, anyway, because long-term clients have them, and the back cover is sold through the end of the year.
And we don’t do the sticker ads because we’re grownups.
Come on, now, with the stickers.
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