The Digitalists

The news that the New York Times would start running ads on its front page made me nostalgic — or whatever the opposite of “nostalgic” is — for my first job out of college. I was the production manager for a small weekly newspaper that was lightly regarded in the community it served and not-at-all regarded outside of it. Nonetheless, we all took our “journalistic mission” very seriously, and so when the original founder sold out to a British newspaper chain, and our new owners started making noises about front-page ads, we all regarded it as the end of the world.

And then one day, our sales team sold a small ad in the corner of the front page … and the world didn’t end. Our readers didn’t seem to care, and I realized that it didn’t really say anything about our journalistic integrity. (On the other hand, a few months after that, ownership brought out a “consultant” from England who was clearly meant to nudge out my boss as editor-in-chief. Within another month both of us had resigned, and the paper’s Anglicization continued apace.)

That experience — and my subsequent career migration from editorial to marketing — gave me a good insight on just how tired and irrelevant is the old debate over the edit/business divide. What I realized is that the divide is really a means to an end, the end being preserving editorial integrity. There is good reason for maintaining that integrity; once you cash in your reputation, it’s hard to get it back. But maintaining the “church/state” divide has its own set of risks.

The biggest risk is that it encourages a “render unto Caesar” mindset, where both sides can do whatever they want as long as they don’t infringe on the other side’s playground. But that’s a crazy way to run a business. For one thing, it’s given rise to those ridiculous “advertising supplements” which no one in human history has ever read. But more importantly, when editorial is focused on serving “the public good” and sales is focused on serving advertisers, no one’s thinking about what should be the focus of any business: serving customers.

Because the truth is, most customers don’t particularly care about how brightly the line is drawn between edit and sales. What they do care about is getting relevant information. That same newspaper had a standing ad in every issue from a well-respected local travel agency, advertising their lowest fares to various cities (this was in the days before Expedia and Kayak made finding cheap fares a simple task.) Our readers looked forward to that ad, avidly scouring it for the latest deals. It may not have been journalism, but it was content, even if that content was produced by an outside party who was paying for it to be there. And if we had bounced the ad in favor of a different travel agent, simply because they were willing to pay us more money, we surely would have heard it from our readers.

Unfortunately, the church/state mindset is probably too entrenched at newspapers to ever change much. But in the online space, lines are much blurrier, and that’s a positive development. Many online journalists are starting to figure out that they can’t simply ignore the “business side”, or cede it to other departments. In fact, if they’re independent bloggers, they are the business department. That doesn’t mean they let business considerations rule over editorial judgement; it means they have to make those decisions on a case-by-case basis, and that rather than applying the blunt criteria of “Is this editorial or advertising?” they need to rely on more nuanced critieria, such as “Does this serve our readers?” and “Will it compromise our integrity?”

So I’m not particularly bothered by the Times’ new policy. On the other hand, if Arthur Sulzberger brings in a British consultant to “advise” Bill Keller, all bets are off.