'Boston's Weekly Dig' Sends Escort Ads to the Curb

By: Mark Fitzgerald Hey, grandpa, go somewhere else to find a ?date? for the night.

That?s the message the alternative newspaper Boston?s Weekly Dig is sending by banning ads for so-called ?escort services.? It isn?t about morality, Dig President Jeff Lawrence tells E&P -- it's about demographics.

Boston?s Weekly Dig, like all alternatives, is fighting for the young and hip 18- to 34-year-old. Escort services just don?t fit, Lawrence said in an interview Friday. The paper wasn?t put off by the fact that most law enforcement agencies believe escort is just another name for call girl. Worse, the ads attracted only old readers.

?It?s no different than if we started running ads for Geritol or Depends adult diapers,? Lawrence said. ?In terms of attracting readers, content is one thing, but the advertisements, too, are huge part of determining whether your readers are going to respond to your paper.?

Lawrence started re-thinking escort ads when the Dig completed its redesign to a trimmed-and-stitched newspaper that has much more of the look and feel of a magazine than the typical alternative.

The look is hipper now -- and escort ads recalled a kind of seriously dated ?What kind of man reads Playboy?? ad.

Studies show that the Dig readership peaks among the 18 to 34 cohort, then gradually drifts down through the late thirties and forties -- before suddenly spiking at around 50. ?Now unless there are lot of hipsters in their 50s, it seems they search out the paper for the escort ads,? Lawrence said. ?I honestly think there are a lot of suburban men reading the paper for that purpose.?

The Dig even conducted focus groups with the escorts to confirm their demographic suspicions, Lawrence said. ?A lot of the escorts are black, and they told us that a white, married man in his 50s, maybe late 40s, that was the customer they would get,? he said. ?So we kind of looked at each other, and went, this is so obvious.?

Existing customers had never raise much of a fuss about the escort ads, which generally took up two tabloid pages. But they are delighted they?re gone, Lawrence said. Reader response has been good, too, he said.

This week marks the second issue that escort ads have been gone, and the paper has already recovered the lost revenue, Lawrence said.

For the Dig, this is kind of a back to the future move. When it was launched in 1999, it sought to distinguish itself from the rival alternative Boston Phoenix by refusing to run sex-related ads. That didn?t last too long.

?We needed all the revenue we could get,? Lawrence said.

Sex hasn?t been completely banned in Boston?s Weekly Dig, though. The sex chat lines remain, and there are other ?adult? advertisers.

But the paper is rethinking whether to keep ?one or two other ad categories,? not necessarily sex-related, that may not fit the demographic any more, Lawrence said.

?Advertisers like that you?re protecting your demographic,? he said, ?They say, you?re willing to give up revenue to stay on mission -- that's fantastic.?