It's "yucky", "exploitative", and "capitalising on tragedy": there have been ripples of discontent in blogland since Advertising Age flagged up that news organisations are buying up keyword advertising next to search results for "Virginia shootings".
In business terms, it makes sense to try and pull traffic to your site. News organisations are, after all, the places that people go to find out about news events, so is this really cashing in on tragedy?
It's the context - so much more specific, thanks to the nature of web searches - that makes these ads seem, at the least, insensitive.
In the US, The New York Times and Inside Edition were at it. In the UK, the Times, the Telegraph, the Sun and Reuters have variously been plugged next to those search results.
Whether these ads will make money for the sites is questionable: this is primarily about building an audience over other news sites. But is it unseemly? And how could it be managed more sensitively?
