All the News that Marketing Wants

The media is in the bag.

• A short-lived research project in which the Chicago Tribune solicited responses from current and former subscribers to descriptions of Tribune stories before they had been published has been halted after reporters raised journalistic concerns.
  
  
• Kern agreed. He said he had been unaware that the research project, a collaboration between the paper's editorial and marketing departments that previously asked consumers about general topics and past Tribune stories, had in the last two weeks begun asking for their preferences regarding the synopses of stories not yet in print.
  
  
• Surveys were sent by e-mail to around 9,000 would-be readers on two occasions. About 500 responded to each, indicating which of 10 story ideas they preferred. Kern said the stories "tended to be news features," and the results never made it to him or had any impact in how stories were handled.

Backpedal backpedal backpedal. You can't run a country by committee, you shouldn't try to run a company by poll numbers, and you should certainly never run a newspaper by survey - even though that's what the New York Times has been doing for years now, and look at their stock price...oh wait - look at the Trib's stock price, too. And the Sun-Times. And their declining circulation numbers. And the public trust in their material.

Carry on, dead tree media. Carry on.