Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Media AJC is serious about monetizing itself
Posted by Scott Henry @ScottTheHenry on Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 6:19 PM
Over the holiday weekend, the AJC ran more than one full-page ad touting its availability online and across several media platforms. And today we noticed — although it's possible we weren't paying close attention before — that ajc.com now has a "Breaking news center" tagged with a corporate sponsorship. Today's sponsor was a major cable-TV service provider.
Now, you might be forgiven for thinking that a newspaper website's home page should be considered its "breaking news center." But the marketing minds at the AJC have stepped outside the proverbial box to come up with a new commodity that can be sold to advertisers: a continuous scroll of the latest news articles to be uploaded to the website. How this differs from an RSS feed I'm not really sure.
Also, many of the stories don't really seem to qualify as breaking news in the strictest sense. Some of the current headlines include: "Suspected copper thief found dead" and "Economy gains steam, still vulnerable." I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that little harm would be done if someone waited to read those stories in tomorrow morning's paper.
In short, our take on the sponsorship of breaking news is as follows: There but for the grace of God go we. It's not inconceivable that, a year from now, newspapers will be selling naming rights on their masthead. But right now such changes still feel a little icky. Of course, I still miss my pica pole and photo-sizing wheel…
Comments (8)
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appealing to idiots— the same way most businesses stay in the black. ;)
"The AJC SUCkS, I don't how they stay in business."
somebody's got to remind toothless white suburbanites why they pissed themselves and fled from atlanta
Well the AJC stays in business because they're owned by a company with deep pockets and there's no competition. There hasn't been a true competitor to the AJC since the New York Times sold the Gwinnett Daily News to the AJC back in the 90s. I have friends that live in smaller cities that cannot believe we only have one paper in this town (While there are a number of smaller papers in Metro Atlanta, they are not a threat to the monopoly of the AJC.).
The AJC, like papers in many cities, are struggling and trying to find creative ways for revenue. At least they didn't resort to "selling" their copyrights to a company like Righthaven who was suing websites for copyright violations for posting articles from their clients "without permission". They completely ignored the concept of "fair use" and sued 225 different sites and as part of their demands, demanded the surrendering of the web domain. Most of the people they sued settled out of court (I know one such victim of their thug tactics and as a result of them, he eventually shut down his site because he now longer enjoyed doing it.). Turns out that Righthaven had no rights to pursue copyright infringements, as the copyrights remains with the paper and Righthaven was operating outside of the rules. Then Righthaven found themselves being sued and one of their victims won their case and Righthaven refused to pay up and had their assets seized in order to pay this judgement. The irony here is that company demanding sites turnover their domain name(s) had their domain name seized and it is now being auctioned off in order to pay the judgement levied against them.
At least they report negative stories about the mayor! CLATL has been "bought off" on that one! Scott Henry on MSNBC (Obama/Reed Network Central)....
420,000 city of Atlanta residents. Somewhere near 5.1mm suburban Atlanta residents. Selling shit to idiots has never been very hard...
Meanwhile, Creative Loafing continues to show off how cool they are! Gone are the days when CL used to do real reporting and great cover stories. Now, this publication has become nothing more than a blog that is trying to past itself off as a newspaper. Yeah, Thomas Wheatley did a great piece on South Downtown but pieces like that used to come every week. Now, we get lovely stories such as "Bitch crossing a street", "We love Occupy Atlanta", "Kasim is the best mayor we ever had" (even though CL was saying that about Shirley until they pissed each other off and hey here's our opinion about news stories that the AJC wrote. The AJC is not worried as they are nothing but a tax write off for Cox. CL was supposed to get turned around as they are now owned by a holding company that wants to sell it in a few years. Last one out at the new CL Atlantic Station office, please turn off the lights.
I see there's still no reason to read either the AJC (everybody with a smidgen of talent took the buyout) or CL (still suffering from a terminal case of 'hipper than thou').
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