{"id":211,"date":"2009-06-20T11:42:32","date_gmt":"2009-06-20T11:42:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/?p=211"},"modified":"2009-06-28T08:09:42","modified_gmt":"2009-06-28T08:09:42","slug":"a-sign-of-the-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/2009\/06\/20\/a-sign-of-the-times\/","title":{"rendered":"A Sign Of The Times"},"content":{"rendered":"
A sign of our changing times, AMC has now\u00a0downsized their daily print ad, in “The Orange County Register”, to a less than 2″ square, which directs readers to the company’s website and show time phone line. This comes on the heels of a similar downgrade by Cinemark and hints at where Regal’s ever shrinking block ad might be heading. Hardly “front page news”, as print media advertising has been in decline for over a decade, but the theatre industry had been one of the few newspaper holdouts.<\/div>\n
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Time was,\u00a0a given newspaper’s entertainment section was a\u00a0reliable gauge of\u00a0success. From the\u00a0full page ads of\u00a0major chains, to the co-op block listings of independents,\u00a0the local paper provided a visual ranking of exhibitors in your area.\u00a0A near stock ticker, one could track the rise and fall of operators\/theatres by the changing size, quality, position, and frequency\u00a0of their print ads. Even the rise of the industry, as a whole, could be seen, as\u00a0cinemas slowly replaced live theatre and vaudeville listings,\u00a0during the early twentieth century;\u00a0moving on to\u00a0fully dominate the entertainment section by the\u00a0close of the century.\u00a0Now, with most independents having fully abandoned the format and the “big three” moving away from print advertising , we are\u00a0witnessing the literal end of an era.<\/div>\n
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The cinema industry may finally be joining the digital revolution, on numerous fronts, but, I, for one, will miss the days of paper and ink.<\/div>\n
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6\/28\/09 Update<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0By pure chance, I managed to scan AMC’s final Orange County Register listing. Within a day of this post, the company discontinued their ads altogether, including weekends. There still remains a sizeable print ad in The Los Angeles Times, but the company\u00a0seems to have forsaken the more localized Register.<\/div>\n
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On a personal note, I can’t help but recall the countless mornings I cut out\u00a0the Register’s showtime\u00a0listings, as part of my daily management duties. Edwards, Mann, SoCal Cinemas, United Artists, Century, and even Studio\u00a0 Adultland (as a humorous gesture) would be neatly sniped from the paper and posted on a box office clipboard, alongside AMC’s ad. Now, a task that has slipped in to memory, along with the very print ads that were involved.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A sign of our changing times, AMC has now\u00a0downsized their daily print ad, in “The Orange County Register”, to a less than 2″ square, which directs readers to the company’s website and show time phone line. This comes on the heels of a similar downgrade by Cinemark and hints at where Regal’s ever shrinking block […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":229,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions\/229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinelog.org\/cinelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}