ColemanMedia Report

A study released by the Foundation For Needlessly Speculative Journalism last week revealed that over 6 million man hours of work in the advertising industry alone have been wasted in October by reading Mediapost and Ad Age articles about imaginary mergers and acquisitions within the media space. The articles, which focus largely on speculative mergers like those between faltering portals AOL and Yahoo!, and potential acquisitions by media giant Google, have tripled in recent weeks, according to the report. “Speculative journalism is nothing new to the ad industry,” said media watchdog Clive Biegelstein. “But this is getting ridiculous. Over 60,000 words were published yesterday about news that hasn’t even happened yet, and probably never will. It’s like professional trade media has nothing real to report on, so they just make up the news. I mean, really, people, this isn’t CNN or FOX.”

On the heels of the New York Times announcing its intentions to charge for online news content on a metered system, popular news satire site The Onion announced early today that starting March 1st, it will start to charge by laugh for its online content.  Under the new cost structure, The Onion would charge users on a tiered system: $1 for every laugh, $1.25 for every LOL, and $1.75 for every guffaw produced by the site’s online news stories. The move, which stunned thousands of area men and women, was reportedly made to replace declining print and display ad revenues, and according to Onion management, should allow the paper to avoid deep staff cuts.  ”Without this new source of revenue,” said Wilfred P. Lightbody, The Onion’s CFO, “we would have to lay off two of our three American Voices, our entire Infographic department, and Teddy from IT.  Besides, if Rupert Murdoch can charge for what they pass off as news at FOX, certainly we can charge for laughs.”