adrian holovaty

August 19, 2003, 12:59 PM ET

Miami Dolphins get big promo on KansasCity.com

The Knight Ridder newspaper chain, which uses a centralized Web publishing system for more than 30 of its newspapers, is often criticized in the industry for giving those sites a cookie-cutter design.

Well, the design isn't all that's shared; banner ads are shared across the network, too. And that leads to inappropriate, embarassing mistakes such as this on KansasCity.com, pointed out to me by Joel Mathis:

For readers who don't keep up with American football: That's an ad for Miami Dolphins e-mail news updates. On a Kansas City news site.

Miami is about 1,500 miles from Kansas City, which has its own football team.

And I'll bet quite a few fans of the Kansas City football team saw that ad and wrinkled their noses. That's how a site loses readers' trust.

Guess that's what happens when corporate controls the Web site.

UPDATE, 12:22 a.m.: E-Media Tidbits reports a Knight Ridder spokesperson has said that this Dolphins ad was "deliberately scheduled" to run on the Kansas City news site because "there are many Dolphin fans all over the county."

Uh huh.