Bloggers in San Francisco didn't take too kindly to various "energetic" comments made by radio talk show hosts at San Francisco's KSFO, so sent clips of offending remarks to the radio station's advertisers.
A posse of bloggers led by someone calling themselves Spocko objected to language described by the New York Times as violent, racially offensive or religiously insensitive.
Spocko objected to various comments by Melanie Morgan. In one exchange about about a book by environmental writer Rachel Carson, Morgan said it made her want to dig up Carson and "kill her all over again". Carson died from breast cancer in 1964.
Morgan's colleague Brian Sussman, meanwhile, called Democratic presidential contender Barak Obama "Halfrican" - and there are plenty more clips like that documented on Spocko's site.
Spocko claims that publicising the comments led to four advertisers leaving the station - Visa, MasterCard, Federal Express and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation - though the station says that all but one of those have returned.
The station retaliated by claiming breach of copyright for the audio clips that Spocko and his team had published and distributed, sending a cease and desist letter to the company that hosts Spocko's website. The company caved-in and shut the site, though he found an alternative host with days.
And on Friday 12 January, KSFO ran a three-hour special in which the hosts played the clips themselves and, almost, apologised for their language.
But Morgan described bloggers as "crackpots with keyboards" and then turned her fire on media planners: "If there are sponsors who listen to these idiots, I know who it would be. It would be some craven little time buyers at an advertising agency someplace who have no guts whatsoever."
Both sides claiming victory then.
On his blog yesterday, Spocko quite tidily intersects his incredibly detailed daily narrative about the story to acknowledge the wave of readers coming in from the NYTimes story, and summarises the main issues.
His first point? "If you have a business and don't have a blogging policy, get one."
He also says that marketeers asking how to use blogs and how to protect against them are asking the wrong questions:
"Bloggers are people. So if your first impulse is to USE people and to FEAR people then that will inform your choices. I would suggest trying to UNDERSTAND the people who write these things so you can interact with them."
To a point. Advertisers and marketeers are learning how to listen to bloggers, but KSFO might be beyond redemption.
• The Wall Street Journal's tweaks
These are minor changes, but significant nonetheless. WSJ is one of very few websites that requires either a web or print subscription to access most of its stories online and is the world's largest paid-access site. From now on, the European edition will publish an access code so that if readers buy the print edition, they can access articles on the website for free on the same day. The access code is at the bottom of page two and readers can set up various custom options for their own profile.
WSJ Europe's circulation marketing director Rick Zednik said on Mad.co.uk that the move was add extra value to the print edition: ""Our retail customers are among those readers placing the highest value on The Wall Street Journal Europe's content on a daily basis. With this new addition, the value they receive when they buy a copy of the newspaper increases dramatically."
I missed this from last week: WSJ has changed the editorial style of its coverage as its readers have started to use its online news in a different way to its print news product.
Managing editor Paul Steiger told the Washington Post that he assumes readers will have already seen the day's news online: "The culture here has changed dramatically in the last few years." He said 80% of coverage in the newspaper is now focused on analysis, features or interpretation, and only 20% what happened yesterday. Exclusives, he said, will almost always be broken online.
Incidentally, I just discovered that Mad.co.uk appears to be subscriber-access only unless you access the story from Google News, which rather cleverly assures the site doesn't block out what I imagine are a fairly hefty number of referrals.
• MTV plans second virtual world project
MTV already has a a virtual web community based around the Laguna Beach series, and that has 350,000 registered users, although we don't know how regular most of those are. The network is launching a second community space called Virtual Hills based on the TV show The Hills in which avatars of cast members will help users with various project including setting up a virtual gig, according to Reuters.
• Banksy makes a stand against eBayers
Slightly off-topic, but he's good, dammit. People have been trying to flog prints of Banksy's work, or "signed" prints of his work on eBay for anything up to £7,500. Banksy's profile is stellar these days; an LA show, work in the Damian Hirst-curated show at the Serpentine and, erm, a piece on the Guardian front page last month. So he's combatting those pesky eBayers by offering high-res prints for free on his own site.
• Quick! Hello's attractive people poll is about to close!
It's the vote you've been waiting for - just two days left to vote for the most attractive man and woman in hellomagazine.com's annual poll. I confess I hadn't heard of about half the women in the "most elegant bird" category, so my finger is clearly not on the pulse.
