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.
