Payment at the time of placement

Oct 03, 2019 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The Department of Public Information (DPI) has been unable to offer a plausible explanation as to why since June it did not restore the usual amount of advertisements to the Stabroek News. Instead, the DPI has shamelessly sought to shift the focus from its own terrible actions to the value of advertisements which the Stabroek News has received from the State.
This was unethical. The DPI is a client of Stabroek News. It is not supposed to make public the sums which it has paid to any media house. That is privileged information which ought to have been protected from knowledge by the newspaper’s competitors.
The information is now in the public domain. Everyone knows the value of advertisements which media houses have been receiving over the past years. DPI was more interested in making a point about Government’s generosity to the private media than about protecting privileged information.
The revelations have excited some so-called social media journalists. They are suggesting that they too should be entitled to advertisements. They have not said, however, what investments they have made to be considered bona fide publishers. Ads are placed with publishers, not editors or journalists.
The so-called social media journalists are operating on publicly available platforms such as Facebook. The government has not reported if and how much it ever paid to social media journalists for advertisements. But it is believed that some of them would have received payments for carrying social media messages.
The DPI is not doing any media house a favour by its placement of Government ads. The newspapers are providing a service. It is not a donation from the government. It costs money to publish a newspaper. It is not free. It costs a hell of a lot of money.
Advertisements are not cash transfers or grants. So when the government says that it provides $X for ads to a particular newspaper, it should have also indicated that it got a service for that sum, a service which it needed and which it paid for.
It takes money to run a newspaper. Debt and ‘receivables’ add to the cash flow problems of publishers. This is why newspaper are concerned when their ‘receivables’ are high because it means that they will be short on cash. You cannot tell your staff that you will pay them until those who owe you decide to settle their indebtedness.
Newspapers have a right to demand payment before any further advertisements are published. They are justified in being circumspect during period when elections may be held. There is no guarantee that if a government loses office that a new government will want to honour the debt obligations of the outgoing one.
Many media houses have been burnt by the failure of political parties to pay up their campaign debts. Newspapers therefore are in order to ask that before any further ads are carried that there be a reduction in the amount owed to them. In fact, they should insist on a policy of payment at the time of placement.
The advertisement controversy has exposed the risk, which media houses face when dealing with governments. It suggests strongly that there is a need for the placement of government advertisements to be liberalised.
The DPI should not be responsible for placing all government ads. Each Ministry or corporation or agency should place its own ads because each would be better placed to know what sort of audience they are seeking to reach and whether they are obtaining value for money.
The actions of the DPI suggest that it cannot be trusted any longer with a role in the placement of government ads. It has offered no credible explanation for the massive reduction in column inches of advertisements provided to Stabroek News as compared with that of Kaieteur News and the Guyana Chronicle.
A fair system of allocating Government ads needs to be developed, one that is not centrally controlled and which factors in circulation and reach.
The Guyana Times deserves more than the 10% of state advertisements that it receives. That newspaper is much fairer and more balanced than the Guyana Chronicle, and probably has a bigger circulation. Its share of the total value of government ads does suggest that it is being short-changed.

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