For Journalism Wonks
Would the editor of the New York Times allow an article in the paper to be partially covered by an advertisement, until you ripped it away? I don't think so. But that's exactly what's going on on the Web, and it's raising some weird questions about the nature of church/state separation in journalism.
The other day, I clicked on a Times article. Above it was a banner ad for General Electric's "Ecomagination." A small frog was perched on the corner of the ad. As soon as the page filled, the frog hopped across the screen and perched on the first paragraph of editorial type. Eventually it hopped back, but still...infuriating.
You've probably seen variations on this—new pop-ups that superimpose themselves over text and won't go away till they're clicked, shadow ads that bounce back and forth across the page like the ball in Pong; ads that speak to you, not when you click on them, but when you load a page. I just saw an ad that deliberately obliterated one line of a paragraph of an article and only moved after I clicked a forward arrow on my browser.
As web ads get more aggressive and invasive, the editorial experience deteriorates. Articles are obviously harder to read; but more importantly, the distinctive and important separation between editorial and advertising becomes blurred in ways that old media types don't really get. (It's the 20-somethings who are creating these web pages, and the ads that corrupt them; the Bill Keller types are, I'm sure, clueless.) Ultimately, what we're heading toward is some Internet version of product placement, except in news articles rather than half-hour sitcoms.
So many media companies are now depending on the Web to attract readers and improve their bottom line. But this is a sure bet to scare readers away.
