I am reading the new biography ‘All Governments Lie’: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone by Myra MacPherson. Mr. Stone worked for a few years at the famous experimental New York newspaper P.M.
Reading again about the trendsetting daily of the late 1940s and early 1950s was coincident given the news of recent weeks that a few newspapers were going to put advertisements on their front pages.
A momentary irony for the print news business: Civil liberties types — including libertarians, First-Amenders and assorted lefties (but not all of the left, who often fear dissent) — and historically acute political conservatives called throughout decades of the 20th century for advertising-free publications. They saw the power of retail marketing to influence news judgment. The Arkansas Gazette won its two 1958 Pulitzers (for work in 1957) for standing up for school integration, not merely for the correctness of the position but to do so at the expense of an advertiser boycott, after all.
P.M. was run on revenue from subscriptions, not ads, to avoid such issues. That paper found ad-free also meant profit-free and folded in less than a decade. What’s left of this proposal but Consumer Reports?
Oh, Millions of blogs. We don’t even charge subscribers. Most don’t run ads and those that do are picking up coffee money, barely.
In the age of the Internet, what will keep newspapers afloat seems to be clever uses of the Internet, where nearly all is free but for the ads along the sides or popping out at you one way or the other. Subscriptions be damned online, though my Demzette, The Wall Street Journal and the opinion parts of The New York Times do insist on a credit card. But advertising revenue is not nearly so robust in the ether so there’s been some belt-tightening and rumors of more.
Thus, subscriptions are dropping, apparently in favor of Internet news output. Does that mean advertisers have more power to influence independent journalism now? The pundits don’t seem to look at this like that, as they did 50, 60 years ago.
Then again, there’s this opinion in Slate. The longtime Slate analyst Jack Shafer emphasizes that front page ads are nothing new. A few papers never stopped — Our Northwest Arkansas Times, for example.
Those commentators decrying front-page ads: On the Internet, all pages are front pages, no? -30-
