Michael Kinsley:

And so, at last, there are two piles of paper: a short one of stuff to read, and a tall one of stuff to throw away. Unfortunately, many people are taking the logic of this process one step further. Instead of buying a paper in order to throw most of it away, they are not buying it in the first place.

No one knows how all this will play out. But it is hard to believe that there will be room in the economy for delivering news by the Rube Goldberg process described above. That doesn’t mean newspapers are toast. After all, they’ve got the brand names. You gotta trust something called the “Post-Intelligencer” more than something called “Yahoo” or “Google,” don’t you? No, seriously, don’t you? Okay, how old did you say you are?

Kristian Knutsen nicely rounds up commentary on the recent WIBA/Amcore newsroom sponsorship deal:

his is the third part of an extended look at the deal between Clear Channel Madison and AMCORE Bank to sponsor the WIBA-AM (1310) newsroom. The first part examined the deal and the possibility that similar sponsorships of other Clear Channel newsrooms are in the offing, while part two looked at how the deal could affect WIBA’s reputation.

WIBA is receiving some grief from the Capital Times (part of the $120M advertising enterprise that is Capital Newspapers) over the sale of naming rights to its newsroom to Amcore Bank.

Steven Levingston:

The agreements reflect the proliferation of corporate sponsorships in recent years — think FedEx Field and MCI Center — and the pressure many newsrooms feel to boost revenue. Close alliances between companies and news enterprises, however, raise a special set of issues related to journalistic integrity, ethicists say.

With journalism still under a cloud from some high-profile scandals, newsrooms must go to the greatest lengths to convince the public of their independence and credibility, said Kelly McBride, a journalism ethics expert at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a journalism training center.

“This undermines all the efforts we’re making to protect our credibility,” she said. “It creates the perception that the newsroom is for sale to the highest bidder.”

An informed society must understand that advertising, sponsorship or underwriting will always include influence. The real solution, from my perspective, is the ongoing disaggregation of media, with many, many more choices and a number of aggregators.

I wonder how sponsorship of a newsroom is any different than wrapping the daily newspaper in a sponsor’s first thing visible full page ad? See a local example here.