October 25, 2005

Paper paid to print only good news

Did I miss a day of jour­nal­ism school?

Because I don’t remem­ber when Don Ranly said it was OK to be paid by a city’s coun­cil to print only good news.

If I were the Star-​Ledger, the local daily, I’d start up a mar­ket­ing cam­paign pronto. I don’t think it’s worth attack­ing this joke of a weekly, but a cam­paign along the lines of “Good news. Bad news. And every­thing in between.” might be just what the doctor ordered.

It’s bad enough that we’ve got pro­pa­ganda at the national level, but to see this bla­tant pay-​off at the local level is disturbing.

If the Newark Weekly News is pub­licly admit­ting to taking money for pub­lish­ing good news, then how many other papers are doing the same thing, only we haven’t heard about it.

Local blog­gers, start your engines!

Filed under: Journalism

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  • http://www.inluminent.com/ John Engler

    Now that’s total crap. I can’t believe that this is hap­pen­ing in NJ, and I hope it never hap­pens in Texas…

    I could see it work­ing, if it were a full page of sto­ries that were all ganged together and had a dis­claimer that said “Advertising” at the top and bottom of it, with a block of text that said some­thing like “These sto­ries were all sug­gested and paid for by the mayor’s office and the city council” but, to run those sto­ries as news? That’s preposterous.

    Thanks for point­ing Chris.

  • http://inluminent.com/2005/10/25/press-paid-to-write-good-news/ Press Paid to Write Good News at inluminent

    [...] Press Paid to Write Good News – This is pre­pos­ter­ous. And really, really sad.   #     [...]