A Fading Taboo

Paper by paper, advertising is making its way

onto the nation’s front pages and section fronts.

Sometimes they snake across the bottom of the page as relatively unobtrusive six-column strips. Sometimes they catch the eye more forcefully as right-corner boxes. And sometimes they scream for attention as in-your-face fluorescent stickers plastered across a newspaper's masthead.

Whatever the shape, size or hue, the long-unfashionable page-one advertisement is gaining grudging acceptance from many editors, page designers and even reporters. As the industry struggles to identify innovative sources of revenue, newspapers not only are launching audacious online ventures but also are dangling fresh enticements for advertisers in their old-fashioned print editions.

Page-one ads may net premium prices, but they're distasteful to many journalists who believe they violate the purity of page one and the sacred wall between news and business. From a design standpoint, they can detract from the flow and order of a page. They also eat up space that otherwise could be devoted to stories.

Among newspapers that recently have published page-one ads are the Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer and Hartford Courant. Others, such as USA Today and many other Gannett papers, have published them for years. Still others--the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and Minneapolis' Star Tribune, for example--are experimenting with ads on section fronts but so far have kept page one off-limits. Many see advertisements as part of the evolution toward the multimedia newsroom as long as the business model supports good journalism. As ads creep onto front pages and section fronts, designers are working to minimize how distracting--and sometimes garish--they may appear. Still some see the page-one ad as a sign of painful economic times for newspapers. Others want to hold the line, saying front-page ads are just another in a series of industry mistakes triggered by short-term thinking.

"It's one more in this kind of death by a thousand cuts that the newspaper business seems to be administering to itself," says a journalism professor at the University of Maryland. "In the long run, the big necessity is to get and maintain readers, and I think without question that front-page ads work against readership" as page-one placement can spark visceral reactions not only from journalists but also from readers.

Not that front-page ads are all that new. But at most papers, they've been out of vogue for a while. Among the reasons the ads began to disappear: the advent of professional standards among journalists and heightened competition among publishers. In 18th century newspapers “there was not a sharp distinction between ads and editorial matter.” What's more, the blurring of news and ads didn't really disturb readers of that era. Nor did early American newspapers offer much in the way of page design. As ads and stories trickled in, they simply were dropped onto the page, starting with the first column. The newspapers generally were four pages; front and back were filled first. So the newest material went inside where it “wouldn't smear on people's clothes”. News started to appear on page one in the first half of the 19th century. That approach began to change later in the 19th century as newspapers became more competitive. When major cities such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston each had several newspapers, and publishers relied heavily on street sales, they began splashing more news out front as a way to lure readers. Journalists' efforts to codify their increasingly lofty ethical goals--about unbiased truth and "freedom from all obligations except fidelity to the public interest," as the ASNE canon states--distanced newspapers from their commercial origins. None of this might have mattered so much to publishers, but it happened to coincide with another important development: Prospering financially, the publishers were shedding their partisan affiliations. They gambled that a less biased approach would elevate their standing in the community--and create an opportunity to profit from that standing. But today, with fewer newspapers to choose from, increasing competition from the Internet and decreasing reliance on street sales, the model is changing again.

Source: Donna Shaw, [email protected]

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