Tina Brown's Daily Beast has been up for less than a week, and yet already it is mired in controversy. Well, perhaps mired is the wrong word: Some blogs are noticing the similarities between the logo from Brown and Barry Diller's site, and the masthead for one of Philadelphia's papers, The Daily News.
After a couple rounds of speculation on the web, Philadelphia Newspapers LLC issued a cease-and-desist letter to The Daily Beast. Reached for comment, Tina Brown was all, "What's a Philadelphia?"
The cease-and-desist contains this gem, "Our readers could easily be duped into thinking that your Web site is somehow affiliated" with the Daily News," as if it were a bad thing to have one of approximately four city papers confused for a nationally recognized media blog.
Because you are not allowed to have a good laugh in the media industry, journalism ethicists are upset with the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News for running advertisements promoting a fake airline, without disclosing that the ads were just parodies used for marketing purposes.
"It is clearly deception," says Bob Steele, the Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at The Poynter Institute. "Newspapers should not be in the business of deception. I can’t imagine the Inquirer and Daily News would run fake ads from other companies."
But what if the ads were really funny? CONTINUED »
