On Wed, 2009-11-04 at 00:06 -0500, wjhonson@aol.com wrote:
Public-service broadcasting does have ads. For one they advertise themselves, they also advertise their own sponsors ("Paid for by the Annenburg Group"... and so on).
But the sort of advertisement of which we're speaking isn't that sort anyway. Broadcast media forces the consumer to watch it from beginning to end, you can't flip back and forth through the pages. Newspring advertisement can be completely ignored, not read at all, you can't do that with broadcast advertisement except to turn off the television when the ads come on.
So I think we're not like a broadcast at all. We're like a print vehicle, where a reader can flip from page 2 to page 15 then back to page 7 at their whim. The advertisements are not in-your-face.
I suggest - before anyone else wastes *any* time on this they read the WMF and Wikinews mission statements quite carefully.
This can't be done as part of a WMF project - I'm surprised anyone even proposed it.