PressEthic

Flicking through Sunday’s New York Times, I was astounded by the way news had quite literally been pushed into a corner. On page two of the main news section, Gucci, Chanel, Rolex, Movado, Mikimoto, Tagheuer, Barneys New York and Perles de Tahiti all headlined, while the news summary nestled inconspicuously in the top right hand corner.

Page four and five were near-full page ads for Macy’s and Barneys New York (again). An article on the acquittal of an Indonesian pilot accused of murdering a human rights advocate was squeezed into the top three inches of the left page.

As I turned I found that this was also the case on page seven. And page nine. And ten through thirteen, and fifteen through seventeen… In fact, nineteen of the thirty-six news pages were full or near-full page ads. If you can’t do the math, that’s over fifty percent of the “news”paper that was devoted to advertising.

I’ve always lived in a consumer world, so why did this full-page ad proliferation offend me so much?

Because the majority of times that I turned the page in search of the next article, I found an advertisement. Nothing (or little) else. I was forced to look at that ad for at least a couple of seconds – enough time to register that there was no news to be found on the page – before I could move on. These ads were getting in front of the articles I was looking for, in much the same way that online pop-up adverts did before most browsers were provided with pop-up blocking facilities.

In fact, online advertising is little better. Despite advances in anti-interruptive-advertising technology, advertisers (and news networks that depend on advertising revenue) are always finding new ways of getting ads to “eyeballs”. After users became too accustomed to avoiding pop-ups, there came pop-unders (ads that opened in new windows underneath the viewed window so that the user would come across them when he or she closed or flicked between browser windows.) When these were blocked by most browsers, floaters were invented.

Often evading detection by anti-pop-up software, floaters glide seamlessly across the user’s view. The eye-catching animation and barely noticeable “close” button renders the user almost powerless to interrupt this interruptive format. With regularity, however, has come routine: we’re starting to know how to rapidly exit the average floater.

So what next?

The people at Dow Jones Online had an idea. On Friday, non-subscriber access to the Wall Street Journal website was preceded by a seven second “intro” informing the user that for one day only, the Wall Street Journal was open access “compliments of Philips.”

It was possible to click on “skip intro”, but in about size six font it wasn’t exactly clearly labeled. In any case, the blank white screen was so mesmerizing and unexpected that the first instinct was not necessarily to avoid the interruption. And it was certainly an interruption.

News networks have to be innovative to compete for ad revenue, but I object to advertising getting in front of the content I have requested. Alongside, above or below: fine. But in front of it seems a sign of disrespect, not only to the user – who has come to the network for a service –, but also to the network itself, which should be able to provide that service without unexpected or unwanted interruptions.

In a recent lecture at the NYU Journalism School, Reginald Chua of the Wall Street Journal Asia said that the business of news was advertising. This may be true, but today it almost seems that news is just getting in the way, which would be to discredit the networks and those who work for them.

Unfortunately, as news networks go through a decidedly rocky revenue patch, the fact that those who work for them might not work for them much longer, means that it's difficult for publishers to avoid letting advertisers get inbetween readers and articles. It's just a shame that there’s no ad-blocker facility for newspapers.