Now that I do not edit or publish a newspaper and a Web site for profit, I am a more typical reader. I cannot tell you when or on which Web site I first saw the "Vote for Barack Obama" ad.
Wherever it was, I remember noticing the ad but barely looking at it. I am used to banner ads on Web sites. As a matter of fact, is not the emerging conventional wisdom that they’re so common or annoying that they are not so effective?
Which is to say to my esteemed friend -- and I am not being facetious about my esteem or my friendship -- what's the big deal, Bill?
Bill Mitchell, director of Poynter Online,
asked online the other day a number of loaded…er, pointed questions of editors and news directors whose Ohio or Texas Web sites might have run the flashy and interactive Obama ad. Among them:
- Do you run political ads on the front page of your print paper? How about political ads on post-it style ads? Political ads on delivery bags?
- How much risk is there that readers will view the ad as support for the candidate by the paper as opposed to paid political advertising?
- If you ran the ad, what feedback have you gotten from readers? Did you explain the decision to run the ad to readers?
- Can you refer us to a url with the standards and practices for online advertising that helped guide your decision on this?
- Might your decision about the ad have been different if business conditions were different?
As I said to Bill, I did not notice anything particularly unusual about the ad until his Poynter Centerpiece about the ad appeared in my e-mail inbox. (By the way, I do not intend to opt out of getting Poynter's daily e-mails even though they keep piling up in my inbox. I still may read them.)
I do not think it is fair to compare the front page of a newspaper with the front of a Web site, even though many, if not most, newspapers anymore are running ads on page one.
The front page advertising still does not compare to what's been common on Web sites for a long time -- and that is the point. I do not think visitors to Web sites are at all surprised to find advertising, political or not, on top of a Web site. Advertising has been there from the beginning. We all know what it is.
They also know what Post-Its are.
As for delivery bags, I personally avoided selling political ads on them, but even then I thought a time would come when delivery bag ads would be common enough that having a politician buy one would be OK with readers. The time is close if it is not here already.
The readers have seen enough advertising in different places that they can make the distinctions between news and ads. As difficult as it may be for journalists to accept, readers want advertising, too. Some people read the ads and not the news.
Readers are not dumb. When they see advertising, they figure out what is and what is not.
I am amused by the standards and practices question. You do not see many standards and practices documents around newsrooms. For a long time, newsrooms, on the advice of lawyers with whom I disagree, avoided ethics codes in the belief that having something in writing would make the company more liable in court case.
The question simply ought to be: Are we misleading our customers? I do not think we are.
I bet we will be hard-pressed to find an editor or news director in Ohio or Texas that got a single complaint about the Obama ad -- except maybe from the Hillary Clinton campaign because it probably could not afford it. If she is the candidate in the fall, you see one of these ads from her.
Of course, we should consider how an ad -- or news -- might be perceived. Always. But that likely would not change the decision here because I doubt that there is misperception. Journalists underestimate their audience.
I do not think taking the ad has much to do with business conditions. It has to do with change in what is acceptable to readers. It is an evolutionary process. I do not know this, but somebody must have been appalled when the first ad appeared in a newspaper.
There are places in the newspaper where we never would've run ads before but today no one would bat an eye about seeing one there.
Once upon a time, we would not put a cruise ad next to a cruise story, but then we figured out that is where readers would want and expect to find them. Page one? Editorial pages? Section fronts?
Times change.
The Obama-style advertising might go away, not because it fools anybody, but when readers complain that it gets in the way or when the advertisers believe it does not work.
In case anyone cares, my pet peeve is the pop-up registration box.
(James N. Crutchfield is the former publisher of the Akron Beacon Journal
, where he earlier served as managing editor. Currently, he is student media director at Arizona State University and Weil Family Professor of the university's Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.)
As much as I admire Bill Mitchell, I have to...
