It's newspaper coverage most companies would die for: the front and back pages of major New York City and Chicago tabloids hawking your business. On Monday, Washington Mutual Inc. (WM), or WaMu, got just that - editions of the New York Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times were devoted to advertisements touting the Seattle thrift's free checking accounts, which the company is pushing through a new national ad campaign. The ads were designed to loosely resemble a normal front page. Journalism experts said that a newspaper's decision to sell its front and back page is disturbing, and possibly a poor business choice. "If the prime real estate is turned over to an advertiser - and there is no mention that this is advertising - that's a significant problem," said Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in Florida..."The payoff that you get today from the advertiser will devalue the front page tomorrow," she said. "Whatever deal they cut will cost them more money in the loss of credibility, and they won't be able to measure that cost."More of this article...Search Google News for more quotes by Kelly McBride...
More from the Poynter on the Record Archives >
