Generating links to stories about guerilla marketing campaigns does something else – it rewards guerilla marketing, not competent journalism.

Part of my distaste comes from this: guerilla marketing depends on manipulating the media (see the Microsoft example in comment 8). In the Web 2.0 world the readers are a key part of the media. To the extent this campaign is designed to generate a response from us, it’s a bad idea.

Newspapers converting from print to digital insist that they’re journalists first – that the delivery medium doesn’t matter, only the content does.

Perhaps. But readers evaluate content based on the publisher’s credibility. I don’t think A2.com helps itself establish credibility by manipulating its readers (or offending them by taking over the sidewalks).

I wish A2.com well. I hope they succeed, and I hope discussions like these help them focus more energy on the quality of their content and less on novel (to be polite) marketing campaigns.

Now I’ll go check my dashboard to see how many hits I got today.

[8] Not sure if this campaign acheived its goals, but when we comment or blog about it and generate a link to annarbor_com it helps them with the search engines. So be careful on your blogs, or help offset their gains by adding a link to responsible local media (like http://www.annarborchronicle.com.

As if helping annarbor.com with its search engines was a terrible thing. As if we need to work to make sure it fails.

I think that’s a fair point. This week’s lighter volume of publication here at The Chronicle makes that point all the more clear. We’ve plowed a sizable chunk of effort into handling business matters at the The Chronicle over the last several days, and that has distracted from writing and reporting in a way that I hope is not indicative of a pattern.

As for critiques of AnnArbor.com, I think that they’re most usefully conveyed directly to AnnArbor.com or ideally to specific individuals there. Ultimately, AnnArbor.com is not a logo, or a spray-chalked ad (I think I disliked those probably even more than most people), or a paper edition, or a website, but rather a collection of people who are creating a product that you’re “hiring” to do some job or other — that might be different for different people. [For more on this notion of "hiring the newspaper" see this interview, bearing in mind that you'll have to plow through a lot of other material.]

So maybe you don’t want to hire them to tell you about UM sports and you’d prefer not to have UM sports articles show up in your RSS feed. It’d be useful for the people at AnnArbor.com to know that you’d like the ability to filter that out. It could be that there’s already that functionality built in and all they need to do is point you to how to choose the right feed. Some of our readers, for example, have wished for an RSS feed from The Chronicle that’s free of the Stopped.Watched. items — they just don’t like ‘em. That’s been available from the start, although we’ve not done a tremendous job of documenting it. [Try: http://annarborchronicle.com/feed/?cat=-24 for a S.W.-free Chronicle feed.]

Given a choice between reading (i) in some public place on the Web:
(i) “Why are they such IDIOTS as to think that anyone wants to read Stopped.Watched. items??!! That’s not news …”
and receiving (ii) in a email
(ii) “Is there a way to get rid of Stopped.Watched items from my feed?”
I know I’d prefer (ii).

A note on linking: I think it’s perfectly sensible to link to AnnArbor.com stories — from blogs, other publications, Chronicle comments — as it is relevant to do so. Why on earth wouldn’t you link to a story you’re citing? In any case, while I’m not any sort of search engine optimization expert, my understanding is that the rel=”nofollow” attribute, which is automatically inserted by WordPress into links included in The Chronicle’s comments, alerts search engines to discount those links in the calculus of link counting. Likewise for including a link to The Chronicle in a Chronicle comment — it doesn’t technically help anything … but I do very much appreciate the thought behind the gesture.

I’m thinking hitting them in the head with a 2X4 might make them take the comments seriously. And if they are a failure as a newspaper or an online outlet, then they deserve to fail. We put up with that sort of thinking about the Ann Arbor News, that is had to be supported or it would go out of business. That didn’t work either. I hope the project is a success but if it fails, it won’t be because of comments here at:

http://www.annarborchronicle.com.

Not sure if this campaign acheived its goals, but when we comment or blog about it and generate a link to annarbor_com it helps them with the search engines. So be careful on your blogs, or help offset their gains by adding a link to responsible local media (like http://www.annarborchronicle.com.