Brian Kenney

Oh Roger, won't you please come back?

While I love to hear from our readers, I'm not all that keen when they're just cursing me out. Which is what's been happening all this week, due to the "bouncing" pop-up ad from Little, Brown.  I too, like Roger Sutton, have delicate nerves and find it as annoying as an advertisement can be (and that includes the glued inserts that destroy the accompanying page when you try and remove them.) But unlike the Horn, we accept advertising, which means we need to figure out how to work with online advertisers. So let's get a few things straight.

One, it's not Little, Brown's fault, as some people have been posting. It's our web site, and  it's our responsibility to review new types of web advertising before they go live. But we never had a system in place to do that before...in fact, those of us on the editorial side never even knew when something like this would suddenly appear. I've worked things out with Ron Shank, our publisher, so that we have a system in place.

Two, we won't run advertising like this in the future. Which isn't to say that future advertising won't annoy some of you, some of the time (hello, sound!). 

Three, this particular ad runs another week. Then it ends. 

Four, unlike nearly any other publication in our profession, SLJ.com isn't just a teaser for our print publication. Almost all of SLJ's content is freely available on the Internet. This, I believe, is a very good thing and it is advertising revenue that makes this possible.

Five, online advertising is evolving. We will inevitably make mistakes, and the best we can do is learn from them.

And six, Roger, I completely agree. Your best writing was for SLJ.

Posted by Brian Kenney on June 15, 2007 | Comments (6)