Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Newspaper Movie Listings

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Topic: Newspaper Movie Listings

Mike Spaeth
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1129
From: Marietta, GA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 09-08-2010 07:40 AM

Movie showtimes should be content that the newspaper provides to the reader. Do they charge the television stations for running their listings?

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Jim Cassedy
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1661
From: San Francisco, CA
Registered: Dec 2006

posted 09-11-2010 10:14 AM

Here in the SF Bay area, the San Francisco Chronicle has
been raising its' theater listing rates almost quarterly.
As a result, almost all the independent and many of the
theater chains here have pulled their listings.

My employer owns three theaters in SF. He recently pulled
all of our listings after we did an informal survey of
people coming to the theater by asking them how they
found out what we were playing. Newspapers came in
dead last my a margin of almost 4-to-1.

We did get a very small amount of negative feedack from
some of our more elderly customers about not finding our
listings in the paper anymore. But most of them, who are
living on SSI or other fixed incomes change their minds
and actually feel sympathetic when we explain that it was
costing us about $4,000/mo to list our showtimes, and that
if we put the listings back in the paper, we'd have to
raise our senior and bargain matinee admission rates.
That shuts them up quick!

Just for the record, in order of popularity, most of
our patrons found out what we were playing by:
1) Internet (General movie websites, such as Yahoo)
2) Internet (Our theater web-site)
3) Marquee (Driving/walking by the theater during the
week as they go to or from work or shopping, etc
4) Telephone- (Calling the theater recording)
5) Newspaper

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