Pure as Print? E*Trade joins the conga line of dotcoms making forays into print in an effort to build brand loyalty offline among customers. E*Trade: The Magazine - a
quarterly featuring practical advice on budgeting, investing and retirement planning - follows on the heels of such paper-and-ink ventures as Yahoo! Internet Life, Expedia Travels
(PRN, April 24) and eBay magazine.
Will these offline titles hold their own with readers? Their namesake publishers
are betting on it, considering consumers have already demonstrated a willingness
to ingest content from non-traditional news sources online. Meanwhile, the journalistic
establishment is holding out for editorial purity - both offline and now in
cyberspace. Last week, the Online News Association and Columbia Graduate School
of Journalism (home of the Pulitzer Prize) announced the formation of the "Online
Journalism Awards," which will honor outstanding Internet journalism in six
categories. Service journalism is among the categories - but etailers and sales-oriented
Web sites are not eligible to enter. (E*Trade, Heather Fondo, 650/331-5248,
[email protected]; Online Journalism
Awards, Sreenath Sreenivasan, 212/854-5979, http://www.onlinejournalismawards.org).
Fading Ink. Washington Post director Warren Buffett told investors last month
that newspapers are "very threatened" by the Internet. And his business partner,
Charlie Munger, referred to newspapers as a dying industry, the Post reports.
It was around the same time that the Newspaper Association of America (NAA)
issued research findings showing a steady decline in Sunday circulation figures.
73% of American adults were Sunday paper readers in 1995, but the number dropped
to 67% in 1999. (Debra Gersh Hernandez, NAA, 703/902-1737, http://www.naa.org)