Sizable Concern

On the day Timothy Dolan was installed as new archbishop here, joyful music filled St. John the Evangelist Cathedral and live media coverage captured the uplifting grandeur of the historic Mass. For a little while, at least, Milwaukeeans could almost forget about the sex scandals rocking the Catholic Church. That is, until WTMJ-AM (620) interrupted its live broadcast with an ad for a male sex-enhancing drug.

That’s right, Milwaukee’s top news station ran a commercial for a product named Enzyte, which claims to boost the male function that rhymes with, ahem, election. In short, size does matter, according to Enzyte, and there is now hope for men with underinflated, um, egos.

Mortified WTMJ officials promptly yanked the ad from the broadcast but not before it had run once in its entirety, says Jon Schweitzer, WTMJ general manager. It seems the station neglected to screen the ads it aired that afternoon.

Broadcast news stations have long been ridiculed for undercutting serious news coverage with inappropriate commercials, and this comical mishap certainly qualifies for the hall of shame.

“It was obviously a terrible oversight. There was no sweep of the commercials to see if there were any content issues,” concedes Schweitzer. “In light of what has become a rather public issue for the Catholic Church, it just wasn’t an appropriate commercial to run during that programming.”

Nevertheless, in an industry where the almighty advertiser is sacred, the station has no plans to discontinue the questionable ad in other news programming. Says Schweitzer: “We didn’t see any reason to punish the advertiser for a mistake we made.”

THE NAME GAME
Fresh from Salt Lake City, new Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Dan Egan says it was no accident when he quoted a JS article from 1971. Of course, the Journal Sentinel didn’t even exist until the 1995 merger of The Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel. Although he knew the quote actually came from The Journal, Egan defends his decision.

Huh? Egan and his bosses shrug off the matter as insignificant because The Journal became the Journal Sentinel in the merger. Yet others point out that The Journal, Sentinel and Journal Sentinel are three very different papers, and mergers should never blur rules on accuracy. “They traffic in accuracy, so it better be important to them,” says Karen Slattery, who teaches media ethics at Marquette University.

Egan’s front-page story this fall on overdevelopment in Door County started with an ominous quote and revealed: “That paragraph appeared in this paper in April – of 1971.”

The play on words wasn’t a problem for Egan – “Nobody told me that’s not how we do it around here,” he snaps – or his immediate supervisor, Senior Editor Gary Krentz. “I didn’t see it as inaccurate,” Krentz insists. “I feel like the Journal Sentinel absorbed the history of The Journal.”

“Clearly, they should have cited The Journal,” says Slattery. “The Journal Sentinel isn’t the same newspaper.”

What happened in Baltimore when its two daily papers merged into The Baltimore Sun? “Our policy is to always identify the particular newspaper,” says Ed Hewitt, administrative editor.

In its ethics policy, another major daily newspaper put it best: “Material lifted from other newspapers and other media,” it reads, “should be fully attributed.” That newspaper is the Journal Sentinel.

WHEN “HITS” ARE A MISS
You can take a flack out of public relations, but it seems you can’t take public relations out of a true flack. A former PR specialist, Jeff Sherman has never been shy about promoting his peppy Web site, www.OnMilwaukee.com, but he’s quite shy about admitting he made a big mistake with a recent press release.

“With 250,000 people visiting the Web site monthly, www.OnMilwaukee.com has grown into the area’s second-largest publication,” the press release gloats.

“What a joke,” snorts David Pritchard, chairman of the Journalism/Mass Communication Department at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. OnMilwaukee is an online publication, not a print publication like newspapers and magazines, he says. Because the audiences for online publications and print publications are measured very differently, you simply can’t make direct comparisons between online “visitors” and print “circulation,” explains Pritchard. “It’s apples and oranges.”

It turns out Sherman didn’t contact a single publication for current circulation figures. “No, I didn’t do a lot of research,” says Sherman, a co-founder of the site. He assumed the Shepherd Express was second in print circulation behind the Journal Sentinel, but he got the Shepherd’s circulation wrong by apparently looking at a dated issue. When we tell him the Shepherd’s correct number, he says, “Obviously that puts them at a higher number than us.” After we explain that even Enron-style accounting won’t let him equate online visitors (often referred to as “hits”) and print circulation, he acknowledges, “I guess there’s a little bit of apples and oranges going on there.”

Don’t think this means Sherman, still a genuine PR spinner at heart, is admitting his press release is wrong. Sherman: “We stand by it.”