P-I, Not Playboy

Maybe a Playboy Centerfold can generate excitement with a canned blurb and a posed photograph, but can a middle-aged newspaper columnist? The fearless P-I marketing department evidently thinks so, resulting in our favorite new feature of any local newspaper: "Get To Know…", on the back page of the P-I's local news section, beneath the weather report.

It's now one of the first things we look for in the morning. Each piece pictures a different P-I columnist, and contains a 50-word "quote" that is intended to be funny. It's as if the P-I's marketing people said "we know our columnists lack personalities … let's hire an ad agency to give them some!" It hasn't worked.

For example:

Get To Know...David Horsey: "Readers either adore me or detest me. Only my wife and mother are somewhere in the middle." (ZING!)

Get To Know…Melanie McFarland (TV columnist): "My mother severely limited the time I spent in front of the tube when I was a child. Look at me now, Ma! … Aw, c'mon, don't cry." (HARDY-HAR!)

Get To Know…Susan Paynter: "I'm so local and homegrown that as a kid, I fed bread to the geoducks." (?!?!!??)

Reading the painfully unfunny blurbs is addictive. It soon becomes obvious that the P-I's ad agency had one person write them all, and that this person was the intern.

More entertainment comes from the unintentional hilarity of subjecting shy newspaper columnists to a photo shoot. The columnists don't just look uncomfortable in front of a camera, a few look as if they have assented only under threat of bodily harm. Worse yet, no one thought to provide a wardrobe person. The columnists are photographed in their own drab clothes, which suggest "personality" as convincingly as a picture of Daniel Baldwin suggests "sobriety."

Poor Robert Jamieson, a very good local news columnist, is the subject of an attempted "action shot." He stands, hunched over, pencil on paper, trying to achieve a penetrating, curious look. Instead he looks like a surprised haddock. And he's wearing the type of dark blue button-up shirt that you might buy a high-schooler for his first job interview.

Surely the P-I's columnists would have been better served by a campaign that highlighted their writing, not their looks.

Unfortunately, the P-I hasn't put "Get To Know..."on the Web. They seem to run a few times a week. Today's is "Get To Know…David Horsey," a re-run.