Pop-Ups for Print
Kimball was showing off a new national campaign the NAA calls the Newspaper Value Proposition. If you examine the campaign at naa.org/advertiser–a site that greets you with the headline “In an opt-out world, consumers opt in to newspaper advertising”–you’ll come across plenty of graphs and ads. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point gets rolled into the argument, along with a book by Ed Keller and Jon Berry whose cover announces, “One American in ten tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy. They are The Influentials.” Sure enough, there’s a graph letting us know that “‘Influentials’ Use Newspaper More Than Any Other Medium.”
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As good as it is to see newspapers fighting back, journalism professor Jerry Dunklee of Southern Connecticut State had qualms. Educators can afford to be purists, and Dunklee, a member of the SPJ ethics committee, pointed out that the dermabrasion-tool ad violates his organization’s code of ethics, in that advertising copy is imitating news copy. He argued that newspaper advertising benefits from the company it keeps, and when that company–the news–is treated with disrespect, the ads are diminished too. “We’re killing our seed corn,” he told me later.
In an imperfect world SPJ is cash poor–without sponsors such as Market Wire it would never have been able to put on last week’s conference. But in the view of the dozen ethics commit-tee members who heard Tatum and Market Wire vice president Paolina Milana make their pitch Friday morning, the world’s not so imperfect as to require this. None of them liked the idea, and all but a couple flatly opposed it. Milana had come to Tatum with the proposition, believing they’d basically be replicating a relationship they’d set up locally a few years ago between Chicago’s SPJ chapter and PR Newswire when Milana worked there and Tatum ran the chapter. Milana told me she reeled out of the hostile meeting and recovered with four cosmopolitans.
What did he say?
When Zinedine Zidane head-butted himself off the field in overtime during the World Cup championship, journalists searched for meaning. “One thinks,” wrote an essayist in Britain’s Observer, “of the footballing philosopher Albert Camus, like Zidane a son of Algeria and France. Not of his famous quote about learning everything about life from football, but of his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, the legend who was condemned to forever push his rock to the top of the mountain, only to watch it roll back past him. Zidane, the legendary, lonely, long-distance footballer, certainly spent much of that final against Italy carrying the ball towards the opposition penalty area only to see it repelled.” Camus’ essay ends, “One imagines Sisyphus happy,” and it didn’t look like Zidane whacked Marco Materazzi out of joy. But whatever.
These allusions raise the un-comfortable possibility that Bush didn’t turn to Camus because he’s miserable. I wonder if Dowd knew what she was suggesting when she concluded, “Maybe next the president should pick up Camus’s other classic, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus.’ Was there ever a national enterprise more Sisyphean than the war in Iraq?”
