The Horror. Not.

This week's On The Media has as one of its stories an interview with James Barron. Barron, a NYT reporter, has contributed to a new book, The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages, and besides pimping it, he and co-host Brooke Gladstone discussed the evolution of that most notable of pages.

One thing in particular interested me. They discussed something I think I've heard about elsewhere: apparently, the Times is now selling ad space on its front page.

Of its print edition, I mean.

See how I had to go retronymic there? I can well imagine that in days gone by, when I bought The Paper every day, how much of a stab through all that is holy it would have felt to see an ad running on the front page of The New York Times. I could tolerate the agate-type PSAs that ran across the very bottom ("Help the Neediest," or words to that effect), but anything more would doubtless have caused me to fire off an angry letter to the editor (or two!). "What is this, USA TODAY!!!???" I can imagine scrawling in my finest purple crayon.

And now? Meh. In fact, more than that. Good for them, I say.

Obviously, as someone who gets almost all of his news online these days, including several visits daily to nytimes.com, I am by now more than used to ads being the first thing I see on any front page. This seems a small enough price to pay for otherwise free content. And word 'round the campfire says that spot costs upwards of $100K. Per day. Which is probably almost enough to keep Bill Kristol in silk hosiery a team of good investigative journalists employed.

Here's a little further reading on the topic: The NYT's more or less official word on the matter; the NYT blog City Room with some interesting history about those tiny print ads I mentioned; and an article from a year and a half ago that someone more suspicious than I might read as the NYT laying the groundwork.

Oh, and one more thing on this whole newspapers-moving-online topic. I am hereby declaring it a definitive mark of old fogeydom if you say something like, "One thing I miss about reading the print edition is the serendipity of coming across articles I probably wouldn't have read."

Pish. And tosh. The number of links on a well-laid out front page like the NYT's, not to mention article page enhancements like "Related Stories" and "Most Emailed" and "Most Blogged," offer a far greater variety and chance of stumbling across the unexpected. Especially when you think about clicking a couple of links in succession. So, Brooke Gladstone, you're on notice. You might as well give up on scrubbing your birthdate from your Wikipedia page -- the cat's out of the bag, ya geezer.