Blog Like NY Times Hypes Advertisers, Double Publishes, Focuses On The Soft

Sometimes you wonder if the mainstream press have been taking too many ideas from online media. A review of Sunday Oct 22 New York Times newspaper and magazine(s) suggests that the NYT is changing its stance on editorial and advertising and the supposed distance between them.

A ‘Public Editor’ column by Byron Calame in this issue of the NY Times gives us a glimpse of the strategic focus there. The NYT is looking to grow its magazines – on glossy paper and newsprint – to sell advertising to support its news department. He says:

Style’s perfume critic — like the advertising-driven concept for the glossy new real estate magazine — is part of The Times’s calculated effort to create new content and publications that will attract additional advertisers. The redesign of most of the paper’s existing weekly sections, such as Travel and Dining, has given them a magazine-like flair intended to increase their appeal to advertisers.

…Basically, [NYT exceutive editor] Mr. Keller has turned big chunks of The Times over to magazine-like content in the expectation of generating increased advertising revenue to ward off cutbacks in the daily sections’ core news coverage. The industrywide slump in newspaper advertising has already forced significant cutbacks at some metropolitan dailies and several dozen buyouts in the Times newsroom in the past couple of years.

Maybe some of this move towards magazine editorial will mean the repurposing of existing content in other sections. The Oct 22 paper comes with an additional magazine style called Beauty Fall 2006 which has a feature on the emergence of trendy spas in old baths. It’s interesting to note that details the spas at Bath in England and Vals in Switzerland (on pages 68 and 70 respectively) are also republished the same day on page 2 of the Travel section.

What we also noticed was the cosiness between editorial and advertising departments that the column by the Public Editor alludes too. What’s slightly concerning is the Magazine article that directly supports a special advertising section with no ‘advertorial’ tag. The article Past Present column on page 104 has obviously been written to support the advertising appearing less than a dozen pages later on 115. The Past Present column features several large full page photos of a property at Further Lane in the Hamptons – which funnily enough is featured in an ad by the realtors Brown Harris Stevens in a multi-page ad section called ‘Best of Luxury Homes & Estates’. There is no ‘Advertorial’ sign on the Past Present column, but we can’t image that the column was at the very least ‘inspired’ by the advertising.

These changes at the NY Times reflect a move towards a style that is being led by online publishers. But with online publishers, transparency rules – bloggers get burned for ‘flogvertising‘. Offline, the NYT can enjoy the fact that they have no features that drive transparency – there are no reader comment boxes below each article calling out bad play.