Crossing the line

The New York Times reports, via Stephanie Clifford, on the state of the The Los Angeles Times:

A day after it ran a front-page advertisement for an NBC show that resembled a news story, The Los Angeles Times faced more questions for another promotion designed to look like news. This Sunday’s Calendar entertainment section will be accompanied by a four-page advertisement for the movie The Soloist that is laid out like a news section.
The advertisement includes an interview with Times columnist Steve Lopez, who wrote the book on which The Soloist is based. His columns profiled Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless and mentally ill Los Angeles man who was once a promising musician at the Juilliard School.
A spokeswoman for Paramount Pictures, which is distributing the film, said that The Los Angeles Times approached Paramount with the idea of using the Steve Lopez tie-in to promote the film. The advertising deal included an online contest and promotional spots about the supplement that ran on KTLA, which, like The Los Angeles Times, is owned by the Tribune Company. The Los Angeles Times also approached NBC with the idea for the front-page ad.
With ad revenue plummeting at newspapers, media critics said they were concerned that the business sides of papers were trying to blur the line between ad and editorial content to attract revenue. “You dress an ad up to look like editorial content precisely because you think it will make it more valuable,” said Geneva Overholser, director of the school of journalism at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. “Fundamentally, that’s an act of deception.”
The supplement is clearly marked as an advertising supplement, said Nancy Sullivan, a Times spokeswoman. The bylines have “special advertising section writer,” and the font is different from the one the newspaper uses, she said. She said the paper had run a similar advertisement before, for the movie The Black Dahlia in 2006.
In 1999, the newspaper published a Sunday magazine section about the opening of the Staples Center arena which drew criticism. Readers, and most of the newsroom staff, were not told that The Los Angeles Times had agreed to split the profits from the magazine with the convention center. The paper later ran a front-page apology, and its media reporter detailed in a fourteen-page special report how the deal had developed.
At a meeting Thursday afternoon to discuss the NBC ad, the publisher, Eddy Hartenstein, said he had run the ad over the objections of the newspaper’s editor, Russ Stanton. Neither Mr. Hartenstein nor Mr. Stanton returned phone calls requesting comment Friday. The Los Angeles Times had received more than 80 email messages by Friday afternoon to the readers’ representative about the front-page ad.
“The line between real news and commercials have blurred to a point that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate the two in future editions,” Tom Greene wrote. A La Jolla reader, Jeff Prescott, wrote, “Today, the Los Angeles Times lost its dignity... and (after 43 years) a reader.”

Ricos says that, when he worked for a now-dead publisher, this sort of thing was called a 'velvet hammer', where you had apparently editorial content that was really one big ad...