News and Record(N&R) makes moves based on Greensborosports.com blogs

from N&R editor John Robinson’s blog at www.news-record.com:

No, we’re not selling beer to high school students

Our friends at Greensboro Sports didn’t like the beer company ad on our high school sports site. I wrote that sentence in the past tense because we removed the ad from the site.

The post — “N&R selling beer to high schoolers?” — says that we shouldn’t market beer to high school students. Fair enough. The ad rotated through a number of our pages, and it was easy enough to rejigger to skip the high school page.

I wonder, though, about the responsibility any Web site has to police its advertising based on morality and expected page viewership. I don’t know what would happen to televised sports — watched, I presume, by a lot of people under 21 — if they could not advertise beer. Personally, I find it hard to believe that a beer company ad on a Web page would be a contributor to underage drinking, given the saturation marketing beer companies do elsewhere.

But I do understand the point. In the paper, we try to not run strip gentlemen club ads on the high school page. I guess beer company ads, like those Joe Camel one’s, fall into the same category.

I’m probably more ambivalent about it than I should be, but it all feels a little politically correct to me.

from Greensborosports.com:

Thank-you John Robinson for what you and the News and Record did. You removed the ad from the high school only area of the N&R on-line sports section. I hope it helps if a kid was reading that page and was possibly making a decision on say a Friday night beverage choice. If it helps one kid then that’s a good thing and it’s good to know that Greensborosports.com has some sort of influence in the community. We do not have the resources of a large newspaper but we are out here fighting the good fight and we are far from perfect. I respect the News and Record because they do things and we will try and keep it coming from all directions too.

On that note maybe I have been drinking too many of those Rip It Energy drinks lately and I probably need to back off a bit and take it easy and quit bringing it to the table with so much force and vigor as I have been in recent days. I plan on backing off and taking a few days to let this site cool off a bit and to reflect on the future.

Maybe one more Energy drink won’t hurt and then I will take a few steps back next Tuesday and have lunch over at Wimpy’s Diner.

Again John Robinson is class act, you never see John Hammer or his gang checking in over here because they are asleep and Scott Yost is continually doing his thing whatever that’s supposed to be. You can say what you want, but John Robinson is in touch with what is going on around here in our community. A response in one day from the on-line newspaper? You bet, and the TV stations in this town are working one shift only and it is a three-hour shift.

Let’s do something together…..

2 thoughts on “News and Record(N&R) makes moves based on Greensborosports.com blogs

  1. Andy, thanks for saving thousands of underage kids from rushing out to buy beer after reading an ad on the the newspaper’s web site. Your next crusade should be to get the paper to remove their car ads so 14-year-olds won’t buy cars. Honestly, how you can smear a child’s reputation in one post and then so smugly claim to be concerned about the content they read is beyond me.

Comments are closed.