Audience? What audience?
Fox News - that bastion of fair and balanced reporting - has accidentally made an honest admission about it's real raison d'être.
The June 14th edition of the Wall Street Journal* includes a story about the new coat of paint being applied to the Fox News website. Here's the tale as quoted in the latest PR Watch Weekly Spin newsletter:
In its "first large-scale change since 2001," Fox News is launching a major redesign of its website.
Fox News vice-president of national ad sales Roger Domal said, "In addition to just freshening up the site and making it easier to navigate ... it's a reaction to what advertisers want."
Fox News hopes the site "will enable it to become a significant competitor in the online news space. This month, the site doubled its advertising sales staff in New York and San Francisco ... The company believes the redesign will help the site double its advertising sales for 2004 ... and double its audience."
Ah ha! The secret formula to web success is at last revealed! Double your advertising staff, build a greasier gullet down which you can push more advertising, and you'll naturally double your audience.
Oh, and by the way - have we just slipped down a wormhole back to 1998? Have those foolish scientists, teleporting their qubits (below) somehow thrown a loop into the space-time continuum?
Since when did some company re-cooking its web site merit a story in the WSJ, fercrissakes? Short of copy down there, guys?
*No point linking - the story's locked behind a paywall.
