ProJo milks foreclosure boom for ad revenue

I'd been meaning to get to this, but Anchor Rising's Marc beat me to the punch last week with this spot-on post:

ProJo: In Foreclosure, there's profit!

Posted by Marc Comtois

What to make of the "Housing in R.I." section displayed prominently on today's ProJo.com frontpage?

Let's see, hmmm....wow, how ironic, Both condo sales and foreclosures are rising. Weird. Aw gee, Foreclosures taking a toll on Providence neighborhoods that's sad. Not just here either? Nation's mortgage woes put brakes on construction of homes, apartments. Yikes.

Wait a sec, I wonder.....I've seen those house flipping shows....hey look! Buying foreclosed property: What to watch out for. Oh, and What to do if foreclosure looms, yeah whatever....take me to the....

Foreclosure ads in projo.com

Talk about your journalistic and advertising symbiosis!

Heck, I recognize there are opportunities out there given current housing market conditions. (Full disclosure: I spent a summer as a cleaner of recently foreclosed homes). But isn't a little weird for the ProJo to have a bunch of stories on various aspects of the current crunch all seem to lead into their own foreclosure advertisements?

UPDATE: It's possible that the "symbiosis" described by Marc is a byproduct of Google's AdSense or a similar program that searches for relevant keywords and groups related content. Yet the regular section of foreclosure-related legal ads published by the ProJo -- thicker than some of the newspaper's news sections -- show how it is indeed profiting from the number of housing foreclosures in Rhode Island.