Selling Wall Street Journal Subscriptions Against My Will

City Lakes Real Estate Blog 2.0:
Due Early 2011

A capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.

--Lenin

I suppose the blogging equivalent of Lenin's famous line is, "a blogger whose ads are served by Google will end up promoting that which they denounce."

Which explains all The Wall Street Journal ads bracketing my last post (Google samples key words, and serves ads that appear to be related -- never mind the context).

Amongst other upgrades (Wordpress platform, "jumps," customizable format, etc.), the new-and-improved version of this blog will have better control over ad-serving.

Look for it in early 2011!

P.S.: Personally, I always thought that The Journal should charge for its (time-saving) annotations, and give away the unabridged articles. Instead, it's the other way around.

The WSJ . . . Brought to You By Acura??

Ending the "Newspaper Blackout" (for a day)

Noted a curious, full-page ad in the bowels of the first section of today's (print) Wall Street Journal: the online edition of the paper is available, free, courtesy of Acura. Typically, non-subscribers can only see headlines followed by brief annotations.

(Note: per my earlier post, "Are Newspapers Stealing a Page From Banks' Playbook," my print copy continues to arrive daily, months past the end of my subscription.)

Acura's gambit recalls the days when a big, local advertiser would buy up the last bloc of unsold NFL tickets, officially rendering the game "sold out" -- and lifting the league's mandatory TV blackout in the home team's market.

Online vs. Print Media

What's curious about Acura's "ad buy" is that you have to be reading the print copy to realize the online version is free -- which sort of makes it a moot point.

The second curiosity has to do with the nature of online news, which regular consumers such as myself already know (I get about 99.9% of my news online, and have for years).

Namely, there really is no such thing as "today's paper."

Rather, articles are posted continually, 24/7, then slip in prominence as new articles supersede them.

So, yeah, articles from "today's" Journal are available unabridged, but they're intermingled with annotated articles that were posted before and after today's edition went to press.

I have no idea what Acura paid for its plug, but I doubt you'll see a repeat . . .