Over at Greenwich Roundup they’re wondering why the weekly Greenwich Citizen has suddenly grown bigger now that it’s been taken over by Hearst, which also owns Greenwich Time. They speculate that it’s so recipients of the unwanted rag can wrap larger fish which is a good guess, but I suspect that it has more to do with Roundup’s ongoing speculation that Greenwich Time is slated to be folded into Connecticut Post with the Citizen sent out as a Greenwich local. Right now, the Citizen has zero local real estate advertising because its tabloid format required advertisers to resize their copy, designed to fit Greenwich Time’s pages, into a smaller size. By making the papers identical the publisher can either offer coverage in two papers for the same effort or, if Greenwich Time really does disappear, one ad in the remaining local without demanding that advertisers design a new format.
Of course, either approach is academic – real estate brokerages are cutting back the number of offices they maintain, the staff they have on payroll and, surprise! local advertising. A complete lack of revenue will do that and if you’ll check our sales activity since October you’ll notice that there’s essentially no revenue being generated from real estate sales at all, for any offices. So an opportunity to advertise in the Greenwich Citizen may not be as well received as it might have been a year ago.
But there’s always next year, right?
For What It's Worth 