Wednesday, May 2, 2001

Tabloid tests the importance of being Super Racy new daily paper challenges Blesk's hold on the popular market By Kari Neumeyer The posters lined the streets for weeks. At first there was no text, just a black-and-white jagged spiral. Gradually, words made their appearance until it became clear the ads were for Super, a new tabloid daily that made its splashy and salacious debut May 2. On its first day, Super was chock full of nudity. Few newsstands were able to stock the racy tabloid for long. "I sold out by 8 a.m.," said Zdenek Zeman, who has a kiosk at the Muzeum metro station. "I've never seen that before." Sometimes the popular tabloid Blesk, published by Swiss-based Ringier, sells out, he said, although usually no earlier than 3 p.m. But Zeman couldn't compare sales because a distribution snafu left him without Blesk on Super's launch day. Near Zeman's kiosk, two 19-year-old men dressed in red Blesk T-shirts and hats passed out chocolate coins wrapped in silver foil imprinted with the newspaper's logo. Zdenek Plecity and Jan Kleindienst were instructed to say, "Make your life sweeter with Blesk," to passersby during a six-hour stretch. "We counted and we have to pass out two chocolates a minute," Kleindienst said. Although the front page of Super's first issue did report national news, page 15 offered a photograph of a naked, smiling 24-year-old blonde named Monika -- complete with measurements. Sharing the page with Monika were loud headlines and stories about the disparity between sexual satisfaction in men and women, how to deal with infidelity and the average length of lovemaking in the Czech Republic: 30 minutes, according to the report. Among Super's backers is Vladimir Zelezny, the controversial media baron considered an important political ally of Vaclav Klaus, head of the Civic Democratic Party (ODS). If Blesk editor-in-chief Jiri Fabian was rattled by the Super fuss, he concealed his concern. He said sales of his nine-year-old paper were unprecedented on the day of Super's premiere. He said he could neither confirm nor deny that the chocolate campaign was in any way related to the launch of the rival tabloid. "We do these campaigns often," he said. Blesk had an average circulation of 361,523 in February. In July 2000 sales for the first time topped those of Mlada fronta Dnes, a more conservative, newsy tabloid, and the two have been battling it out ever since. Fabian seemed indifferent to the effect Super might have on sales. "It's a good competitor," he said. "It pushes Blesk to be better." Zeman said he leafed through Super before it sold out, and thought at first glance that it looked better than Blesk. "It's more information for the same price," he said. "They put the Temelin power plant on the cover." But Zeman said the appeal of tabloids such as Super and Blesk lies in the reporting of rumors, scandals and affairs. Radim Janecka managed to buy one of the last copies of Super from a stand on Narodni trida at about 2 p.m. April 25. The 29-year-old entrepreneur said he reads Blesk nearly every day, but after seeing the first issue of Super, has decided to read both for about a month before settling on one of them. He hadn't realized that April 25 was the day Super was launched, but said he was drawn to the ad campaign. "The black and white reminded me of brainwashing," he said, "so I couldn't help myself." -- Martina Sedlakova contributed to this report. Kari Neumeyer's e-mail address is kneumeyer@praguepost.cz