Tucson Citizen - Conversion Plans to Arizona Daily Star

Depending the outcome of the Tucson Citizen closing, and the temporary injunction requested by the Arizona Attorney General (see yesterday's post), there would be a transition process involved for those inserts already placed and shipped. The following is from an advertising letter from Susan Cantrell, VP of Advertising, of the Tucson Advertising, sent on May 15th, 2009.

Dear Valued Client,

I’m sure you have many questions concerning today’s announcement made by Gannett that The Tucson Citizen will cease publication with tomorrow’s issue on May 16th, 2009. I hope to clarify our current situation with you.

I’m sure that you will want to know what will happen with your rates and what our circulation quantities will be after that time. Our plan is to convert a vast majority of the Citizen subscribers to The Star. Due to the low duplication factor between The Star and The Citizen, we believe this will be likely.

However, due to the fact that we could not contact any of the Citizen subscribers while the newspaper was up for purchase, we were not able to work on that conversion process until now. You should assume that our preprint quantities will remain the same from Monday through Sunday after May 16th. We will be converting all of our Citizen home subscribers to Star subscriptions for the same price starting on Monday, May 18th. We will continue to insert any Citizen preprints into The Star and will publish additional copies of The Star for single copy distribution to all of our racks and dealers to compensate for losses in Citizen single copy sales. We will monitor our sales closely and be able to provide you with new distribution quantity estimates as we receive them.

Regarding retail, national and classified ROP advertising rates, those rates will remain the same after May 16th except that we will not continue to offer the purchase of one newspaper at 90% of the rate. This is because we will have only one newspaper and we intend to convert the former Citizen subscribers to The Star so that our circulation will remain very similar to our current distribution quantities.

We do, however, have quite a few special offers in place from now through the end of the summer as we try to help our advertisers succeed during this rough economic environment. Please ask your account executive for details on these special discounted offers.

Please bear with us as we go through these transitionary times together. We will
let you know additional information as soon as we can. Thank you for your patience and your business.

Again, the outcome of the possible injunction will impact when and if these actions occur.