Per Ad Age:
The [Wall Street] Journal is running an advertiser’s cover wrap on Thursday for the first time in its history, covering one-third of the front page and all of the back with an ad for Dell. Cover wraps are common among New York City’s Post and Daily News tabloids; just Tuesday, the Daily News distributed copies free to commuters wrapped in ads for the new “Tomb Raider” video game. But The Journal has traditionally declined to obscure its front page with overlaid ads.
Here’s how one Kicker reader and Journal subscriber reviewed today’s “obscured”-front-page Journal:
WSJ sucked today—they took the two column summary that they normally have on the front page and had it on its own page with the Dell ad on the back. The 2 columns only folded 2 columns in so if you wanted to open the paper to an interior page, your fingers had no way of holding the front page—totally lame. I threw it away immediately.
So, while Dell-friendly (and, presumably, Journal ad revenue-friendly), perhaps not so reader-friendly. (Any Journal subscribers have a different experience?)
What if, instead of Dell, a well-funded organization with a particular, controversial agenda wanted to similarly “obscure” the Journal’s front page? Would the Journal take those ad dollars? (Why not revisit our recent News Meeting discussion over newspapers and envelope-pushing —in content or placement or both— ads.)
We need to triangulate WSJ, New York Times, and Washington Post.
(Just a tip--you had better not comment at Newsweek unless you expect to get "Shelled"--one of the ubiquitous Shell ads torqued in beside your comment, as if that were the point of what you wanted to say.)
The ambiguous and shocking relationship between Education Parasite Alpha--Kaplan--and The Washington Post. The less said the better. Perhaps now we realize why there is a distinct lack of interest on the part of some major American papers in a genuine Higher Education section, as at The Australian. If we were to compute the entire cost of ETS/College Board/Kaplan garbage, including the opportunity costs, we would put our finger on one of the key reasons for the incoherence in American education, to the point that the country does not even perform well on the absurd PISA.
The blaring style of advertising is not restricted to The Washington Post. The New York Times is getting carried away as well. If you have to market yourself so blatantly, you clearly do not have anything very compelling to say.
Clean up your site, Washington Post. Perform an audit with readers who post at your site with their real names. Find out about focus and continuity in terms of site design and ongoing coverage of the news. Integrate book news with economic, political, historical, and international coverage.
Begin ever so timidly to inspect the conflict of interest between a world class newspaper and a world class sleaze of an "education" operation.
Posted by Clayton Burns on Thu 4 Dec 2008 at 01:42 PM