The Cincinnati Enquirer owns being 'A Bit Extra Extra' in self-roasting billboards

Reintroduce a paper most locals think they already know, showing it is thriving in digital, timed to the Blink Cincinnati public art festival.

Billboards roast the paper and the city's quirks in 1910s cascading headline type — pride and Midwestern humour under 'A Bit Extra Extra'.

Self-roasting billboards and kiosks across the city ('A politician having a three-way would not make our front page'), a Bengals-opener full cover wrap teaser, app and social cuts, and 'both sides of every story' coasters in local pubs.

Billboards and kiosks ran through Blink Cincinnati from October 2026, doubling as social content, with audio, video and swag phases planned; no metrics reported yet.

In October 2026, The Cincinnati Enquirer launched 'A Bit Extra Extra Since 1841', a campaign and brand refresh created with Cincinnati agency Curiosity to coincide with the Blink Cincinnati public art festival. The premise: most Cincinnatians know the Enquirer, but fewer realise what it has become — the city's last surviving daily, now one of its most influential digital news organisations, part of USA TODAY Co and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, including a 2018 special report on the region's heroin crisis.

The centrepiece is a series of billboards and digital kiosks with a distinctly self-effacing Midwestern humour: 'A politician having a three-way would not make our front page' (a nod to the Skyline spaghetti-chili-cheese order), 'Covering the who dey, what dey, where dey, when dey, why dey and how dey' (the Bengals chant), and 'Who else would hire a James Beard Award-winning writer to review chili spaghetti?' The type revives the paper's own 1910s look, when headlines cascaded down the page in oversized sans serif above serif copy — a style a 1912 textbook praised for its 'majesty of diction'.

Curiosity soft-launched with a full cover wrap of the Sunday paper on the Bengals season opener, and the OOH creative doubles as the campaign's social and digital content. Planned extensions include audio and video activations and 'A bit extra extra' swag — 'both sides of every story' coasters pairing 'UFO spotted over Cincinnati' with 'Cincinnati spotted from UFO'. Executive editor Beryl Love said the agency shared the paper's passion for telling the story of a legacy local news provider 'that not only is surviving, but thriving.'

The paper had a perception gap: known by nearly everyone, but still read as a newspaper rather than the digital news leader it had become.

Launching during Blink Cincinnati put the work in front of a large, receptive arts and city-pride audience.

Self-effacing Midwestern humour earns affection for a legacy institution without chest-beating.

Reviving the paper's 1910s cascading headline style makes the campaign's form itself a piece of the brand's history.

A legacy brand can mock itself safely when every joke proves insider knowledge — a gag only Cincinnatians get is proof the brand still belongs to the city.

As of the October 2026 launch, billboards and kiosks were live through the length of Blink Cincinnati before rolling into the campaign's next phase, with audio and video extensions and restaurant-and-pub coaster swag planned. Curiosity's chief creative officer Jeff Warman, a Cincinnati native, framed it as giving the paper 'a little of the spotlight itself'.