Quickie: Pay for Content? I don't think so.
Longie: OJR deconstructs the homogenization of Knight-Ridder properties. The crusty journalists strike again. Branding. Advertising.
It's not the happiest place, although in some respects it's the Internet equivalent of an amusement park chain.
Or maybe more like a fast-food chain. No matter where you go, you can always be assured that if you go into a McDonald's in Ft. Meyers, FL, it will be more or less the same experience as a McDonald's in San Francisco or Fargo. Where's the fun in that? What's the point of taking a vacation when you see the same stores and newspapers everywhere?
Locally, this happened with the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The old site used to be located at PioneerPlanet.com. Now the paper is pushed back to some obscure hard to reach subdirectory of the site TwinCities.com, which includes other branded papers like City Pages. Going to TwinCities.com, I notice the title of the page:
Your Twin Cities Everything Guide
Which reminds me of the tagline of the Duluth News Tribune:
We're Big On You!
Which also reminds me of some words that are scrawled in marker on a newspaper kiosk on campus. Under the words "USA Today" is written:
Tomorrow The World
With the way things are going, I'm not surprised that USA Today has actually picked up a tagline to this effect. Most of these taglines are crap. Some are useful, especially if they actually tell you what the paper is about. With the ever-increasing conglomeration of media, however, "Your Twin Cities Everything Guide" only tells the gentle reader that the newspaper is probably just overextending itself.
We don't open the newspaper for news anymore. We also open it up when we're bored and looking for things to do. This isn't anything new, but when you open a paper and notice that all the advertisements for "events" are Proudly Brought To You By Clear Channel Communications, things start to get scary. Next time you go driving, look at the bottoms of billboards. I bet you'll see more than one that says "ClearChannel" on it.
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