I’m all for experimentation at online news sites — even when it comes to advertising — but what’s happening at Madison.com beggars belief. I find it through a post by Ken Sands at Morph, the Media Center’s blog, and he puts it well:
Wow. Let’s hope this is an experiment that dies quickly, beaten to death by publishers who understand journalism and integrity.
(I’m not going to attempt to describe the atrocity; you have to go see it yourself to get the full awful effect.)
This isn’t the first adverture in bad taste and annoyance by advertisement perpetrated by an online news site. The Rocky Mountain News, for one, uses popover, animated ads that obliterate most of the page beneath them. At least those can be dismissed with a click.
The fact that newspapers are dealing with a new platform here means we’ll have to put up with such experiments and lapses in editorial integrity. We have to deal with it every once in a while in the print world, after all, when newspapers wrap themselves in ad sheets, or place the occasional, wacky flex-form ad that zigs and zags all over a page.
Online is different, though, and the stakes are higher. It’s not easy in most cities to find another print source for news. On the internet, news (and less annoying sites) is everywhere.
TAGS: ADVERTISING, NEWSPAPERS, ONLINE
