5 Reasons to Celebrate Ads on A1 of the NYTimes
January 5, 2009 by Craig Stoltz
1. A “pure” front page with no ads is a Potemkin Village of journalistic purity, not the real thing. Reporters have always written on the back of advertisements. Car dealers and mattress stores funded Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reportage. Nothing wrong with that. Allowing ads on the front page simply makes the newspaper’s fundamentally commercial nature transparent.
2. Since more people read the news online now than on pulp-and-petrol, they’re now used to seeing ads next to “front page” stories. Today’s NYTimes.com’s masthead appeared between two ears promoting Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, Air France flights and Holland America cruises, among others. Nobody got hurt.
3. Paul Krugman is still disruptively brilliant. Bill Kristol is still trying to figure out how to climb out of the hole he dug for himself as a Bush apologist. An ad stripped along the bottom of the front page will not alter these facts.
4. It makes plain–in a way that will be obvious even to status-quo-clinging news industrialists and their sentimental, shrinking, aging, purist enablers–that the glory days are forever gone. With the Gray Lady on her knees sadly calling out for customers so she can feed the children, nobody can pretend any more. Finally now, the process of saving journalism–not the newspaper–can begin.
5. Who knows? People might actually find the information in the ads interesting or useful. Although certainly not today’s debut–an excruciatingly self-conscious CBS billboardette that uses the potentially deceptive headline, “Front Page News,” running above photos in boxes very similar to what readers see elsewhere in the paper as keys stories inside.
So, Timesfolk: You’re going to stick an ad on the front page and allow it look like. . .it might not be advertising?
Now that’s the embarrassment.
Bring on the car dealers and the mattress stores, I say.
It’s with great chagrin that the newspaper indusry finally accepted the fact that without advertising, we would not exist. And we’ve yet to fully harness advertising. Exhibit A: Every newspaper in existence that hasn’t made money in a long time.
Unfortunately, we’ve taken this backwards philosphy into the virtual world and are paying that price as well. Good call on journalism needing to jump onto the advertising train - especialy the point that we need to be smart about it and makes sure ads look like ads and not just another story on the Web site.
[...] found a celebration of A1 and homepage ads being used by the New York Times. An interesting post on Web 2.0…Really? addresses this aspect of advertising and reminds us that once we accept the role of advertising, [...]