The latest advertising campaign by Trib Total Media is absolutely bizarre, dogmatic, and antithetical to journalism. The City Paper put it best: Trib Total Media: Prepare to be assimilated. That sentence could have stood in for any of the others used in the strange Trib advertisements dotting Pittsburgh’s urban landscape:
Trib Total Media dominates the Pittsburgh market.
Our circulation is growing — the PG’s is shrinking.
Today Western PA. Tomorrow the world.
We’re here to stay. Others aren’t.
Each end with See what’s next.
Facebook is apparently the only place where you can find images of these billboards, courtesy of Elisco Advertising:
Come again?
Drop the anchor!
What on earth are they thinking? Did they watch that bad James Bond movie with the tyrannical media tycoon and mistake it for a business plan? And what’s with the nautical theme?
There are probably lots of reasons to be annoyed or unsettled by this ad campaign, but I think the simplest is this: journalism in a democratic society is not about domination and concentrating reporting in as few organizations as possible. It’s about breadth of perspective in communicating what goes on. If this isn’t immediately clear–which it isn’t to Trib Total Media–then read a Robert McChesney book.
Update: The City Paper covers the Trib’s media blitz in a feature and short article.
