adrian holovaty

October 24, 2002, 10:11 PM ET

A follow-up on nytimes.com ad placement

JD Lasica has some fine points in response to my comments today regarding nytimes.com ad placement. In short, JD argues that the problem I point out isn't a particularly important problem and that's why technical solutions haven't yet been adopted:

Is there anyone out there short of a dimwit or conspiracy theorist who thinks the New York Times would risk its reputation by slanting a review just because it accepts some pocket-change advertising income from an MSN ad that occasionally pops up on a news page?

I know, and I acknowledge many others know, that New York Times coverage probably will not be influenced by advertising. The intention of my blog entry (which I should have made more clear) was not to chastize nytimes.com, but to point out the need for a technological means of avoiding this problem -- which, I maintain, is important. I see two ways this can be accomplished:

• Enable content producers to "turn off" a certain ad on a story-by-story basis. This solution is far from perfect, because it requires that news producers have a working knowledge of their site's current ads. Rather, it's a contingency plan -- an "oh, shoot, that ad really shouldn't go with that story" kind of plan.
• Implement an effective keyword metatagging system that lets computers make "intelligent" decisions on the fly. (That sounds technical, doesn't it?) In other words, assign keywords to advertisements and news stories. Then configure the site's CMS to check the keywords against one another when an article is published. (Or, if pages and ads are drawn dynamically, the comparison likewise would be made dynamically.) In theory, the CMS would flag possible problematic matchups.

Venturing from the ethics world into the similarly important world of good taste, here's a more realistic situation in which this'd be useful -- a story about a plane crash juxtaposed with an advertisement for an airline. I've seen this before. Do you think it's acceptable to have a Delta Airlines ad right above a plane-crash article? It looks bad for the news publication, and it looks bad for Delta. That's precisely where this type of software would come in.

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October 24, 2002, 1:13 PM ET

Thursday's recommended reading

Web design group 37signals has released "Sites that Don't Click," a 10-page analysis of how easy it is to buy products on 10 retail Web sites. The report's findings are just as applicable to news sites; it's important to make it easy to access stories -- directly, not indirectly (as previously discussed on Holovaty.com).

The latest Small Initiatives newsletter says, among other things:

Maybe it's time for a "new" news site -- something that doesn't look anything like all the other sites (which all look the same to me, their awards notwithstanding).

Evolt offers tips to spam-proof your Web site. My prefered method of spam-proofing e-mail addresses is to avoid displaying e-mail addresses entirely, or, if necessary, spell out e-mail addresses (e.g., "web [at the domain] holovaty [a dot] com"). Simon Willison's method -- shielding addresses behind Web forms -- seems to be effective, too.

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October 24, 2002, 11:32 AM ET

Advertising placement at nytimes.com

Something's wrong when you start seeing overwhelming MSN ads on a nytimes.com article comparing the new versions of MSN and AOL:

(Large screenshot: 101 KB)

The Times article (login name: cyberpunk21; password: cyberpunk21) is a reviewer's comparison of the two products. But, with MSN advertisements surrounding the content, the page indirectly suggests the article is biased toward MSN -- diminishing The New York Times' journalistic credibility.

Simply put, it encourages the perception of conflict of interest. And that's a big no-no.

In fairness, I'll point out that reloading the page brings up different ads that have little to do with MSN or AOL. But that doesn't excuse the fact that some users will see the MSN advertisements, make the connection and lower their opinion of the publication.

Some might argue it's good advertising strategy to place the MSN ad on an MSN-related article; after all, people interested in this article will likely be interested in the ad, leading to more click-throughs. Yes, that's true, but a bunch of extra click-throughs does not make this any less unethical. Ethics of journalism come first; advertising needs come second.

The lesson here? Newspaper content-management systems ought to include the ability to turn off certain ads for certain articles. In this case, an nytimes.com producer should have been able to turn off the MSN ad for this article.

UPDATE, 10:11 PM: I've posted a follow-up to this entry.

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