All is fair in love and newspaper war
January 03, 2007
Well, maybe not, but sometimes you just get lucky... Remember the story of the media company that graded prostitutes? As always, the question of 'who benefits from the story' is a pertinent one...
Imagine you plan to launch an ambitious new freesheet that aims to grab market shares from all the existing, well-established paid newspapers, and, while examining you future competitors businesses, you find that one of these respected media companies has a subsidiary company with a website that reviews prostitutes in the same way other newspapers review restaurants. I'll save you all the sordid details, you can read the full story in Danish here (via Journalisten), but say this is a company on par with News International: the website in question is run by The Sun, but the overall director for the site is also the director for the entire corporation, so you can justify a title which sounds pretty much like "The Times buys and tests prostitutes." The Danish media company in question takes its name from its two 'serious' newspapers Jyllandsposten (JP) and Politiken, hence the headline "JP/Politiken buys and tests prostitutes", which, by implication, made the whole media group party to the bizarre 'consumer testing' - voila, what a scoop for David Trads and Nyhedsavisen, who also came close to igniting another Mohammed crisis with the scoop he ran on the paper's launch day...
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