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posted by cmn32480 on Monday March 30 2015, @04:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the can-we-get-this-on-all-the-pages dept.

Lily Hay Newman reports that when big news stories evolve into tragedies and people are flocking to read the latest bulletins online, many major newspapers have measures in place so there isn't a dancing Geico newt competing with dire news. The NYT confirmed that the site has a manual switch that can put individual articles in "sensitivity" mode. The settings seem to be either standard, "noads," or finally "tragedy," depending on the content of the story.

In the case of Germanwings Flight 4U 9525, the Times eventually upgraded to tragedy. "It’s interesting in part because it’s almost an acknowledgement that ads are invasive and uncomfortable," says Parker Higgins referring to the meta tag: meta property="ad_sensitivity" content="noads". "There are no Google results for the tag, so it looks like it hasn’t been documented," says Parker, "but it seems like a pretty low-tech way to keep possibly insensitive ads off a very sensitive story—an admirable effort." After all, the Internet is filled with lists of unfortunate ad placements, and the worst ones are probably upbeat ads intruding on solemn moments. "In these types of tragedy cases, it’s an editorial decision that we make," says a spokeswoman for CNN Digital.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday March 31 2015, @06:52PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday March 31 2015, @06:52PM (#164957)

    they didn't drop everything and go to non-stop rolling coverage everytime some Timmy fell down some well...

    ... although some have come to the conclusion that there's not *that* much difference between Wolf Blitzer's reporting and Lassie's!

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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