Newspaper Innovation

What you see on the right is not the daily newspaper of the Simpsons’ home town Springfield – well in fact it is, but it could only be found in Canada, in an advertising wrap ad for the Simpson DVD movie release. The ad, including a separate front page and a three page special on the movie, ran on Tuesday December 18 in the English language editions of Metro Canada.

The three pages of the Springfield Shopper, resembling a typical American local paper, are fun to read. You can download the 18th December issue from metropoint. You have to print the last three pages or rotate the pdf as they are printed upside down.

There have been discussions about this total dependence on advertising by free paper, mainly because it could hurt an independent editorial policy on advertisers. It was interesting therefore to read the review on the Simpson movie by Rick McGinnis in the same issue.

McGinnes rates the movie with only 3 stars out of 5, and while he had some ‘decent laughs’, he was not impressed by the movie, the article ran under the headline “Simpsons Movie too little, too late”. So no moving too close to the advertiser in this case.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Titles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.