New owners Manhattan Media told the New York Observer last week that the Press would no longer accept "explicit" advertising, and the decision is being praised by the local chapter of the National Organization for Women, the New York Times reports. "[Manhattan Media CEO] Tom Allon is a trailblazer," Sonia Ossorio, president of NOW in New York City, says in a press release. "He sees the future of the newsprint business, and that future isn't reliant on the fast, cheap money of the prostitution industry." Believing that adult ads foster human trafficking, NOW's New York City chapter is asking publications to stop running the ads and sign an antitrafficking pledge called "Trafficking Free, NYC!" (Manhattan Media has signed on). The Times says the Village Voice hadn't yet returned calls for comment on the pledge.

Continue ReadingNOW Applauds New York Press’ Decision to Drop Adult Ads

Last week, a 19-year-old follower of the Yusuf Bey family shot and killed Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey, who was working on an investigation of the group and its headquarters, Your Black Muslim Bakery. Fortunately, former East Bay Express reporter Chris Thompson's run-in with the group didn't end so grimly. In 2002, the Express published Thompson's investigative series alleging acts of torture, rape, and sodomy perpetrated by the group. After the stories were published, the retaliation began. "Someone smashed up the windows of [the Express'] offices, and Thompson received numerous death threats," according to the Village Voice, where he's currently a staff writer. "Men repeatedly tried to follow Thompson home, or staked out routes he took leaving the office." Express editor Stephen Buel tells the San Francisco Chronicle that the intimidation campaign forced Thompson to work in a different county for months, and shook the paper to the point that "we stopped writing about the group."

Continue ReadingGroup Behind Journalist’s Murder Threatened Alt-Weekly Reporter

"The goal is to transform advertising from mass messages and 30-second commercials that people chat about around the water cooler into personalized messages for each potential customer," the New York Times reports. To do this, Digitas, a unit of the Publicis Groupe, plans to create thousands of digital versions of ads using low-cost offshore labor, and then will use data about consumers and computer algorithms to decide which message to show at which moment to every person who turns on a computer, cellphone or TV. The Times notes that Publicis is "trying to carve out a niche as a middleman" between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, and the consumer brand companies that buy advertising. "It's clear the three of those companies will have a huge share of revenues which will come from advertising,” says Maurice Levy, chairman and chief executive of the Publicis Groupe. "But they will have to make a choice between being a medium or being an ad agency, and I believe that their interest will be to be a medium."

Continue ReadingDigitas Looks to Build Global Digital Ad Network