You’ve probably noticed but may not have known what to call those print ads completely surrounded by news content. They’re “island” ads. They’re common in magazines. Some newspapers run them in the stock tables.
There was a time as an editor I helped to squelch a proposal by the advertising department to sell “island” ads, and felt righteous in doing so. Now I’m unsure that it was correct to be obstinate. I’m certain that it wasn’t righteous. It may have been foolishly insular.
What prompts this reconsideration is Staples.
The Los Angeles Times published a 168-page issue of its Sunday magazine full of soft stories and advertising about the opening of Staples Center, a downtown arena. It turned out the Times shared its considerable profit on the magazine with Staples Center. The word Staples became an instant metaphor for a head-on collision of journalism and business values.
At Poynter, we take journalism values seriously. We cherish them, proclaim them, teach them. We regard the Staples case as a classic lapse in journalism values. Remember that, please, because I’m about to confess that not only am I rethinking island ads, I’m inclined to agree with Mark Willes.
Yes, the same Mark Willes who as Times-Mirror CEO deliberately demolished “The Wall” between the newsroom and business offices at the Los Angeles Times. The Staples Center profit-sharing deal happened, said Willes, not because The Wall came down, but because the people who used to be separated by The Wall didn’t talk to one another.
Willes is right about the need—at the proper management levels—to talk to one another. Segregating the newsroom from the business offices was once a virtue. It protected newsgatherers from subtle or overt commercial influence. But many of us journalists took the separation too far, ignoring, disdaining, even demonizing the people on the business side of The Wall. In the last two decades, as bottom-line considerations became more urgent, journalists have lamented corporate freezes, assailed newsroom downsizings, declared the First Amendment to be at peril from grubby commercialism, and argued, sometimes persuasively, that public media companies can “do well by doing good”—profit long term, that is, by investing more in quality of news content.
To little avail. Bottom-line fixation has deepened. Wall Street expectations have heightened. The inexplicable dot-com economy has made long-term strategic investment sound quaint. And, as we at Poynter can attest, senior executives of big media enterprises have become inured to lofty conferences on journalism values. Preaching values has not worked.
Well before Staples happened, Poynter concluded we must develop a curriculum that helps news executives understand what the business side is confronting, and that helps media business executives understand how journalism values are a strategic asset. This is not heresy, especially for Poynter, whose founder was both editor and publisher and who meant it when he said better journalism was good business. If this management dialogue is to be effective, where better to foster it than at a school that treasures and teaches journalism values.
Poynter’s program in Journalism, Business, and Values will be an agency for discussion and consideration among people who need to talk to one another, even if it’s to clarify where and how they disagree. Be sure to check our website (www.poynter. org) for programs we’re developing to address these issues. If they work right, we can help creative people from both sides of The Wall explore whether they have shared purposes and even, perhaps, shared values.
This makes clarity about journalism values more important than ever. There are important principles to which newsrooms must cling. Groups like the Committee of Concerned Journalists and organizations like ASNE have been working to define and reassert them.
It will help this process if journalists recognize that not every part of the newsroom culture is an expression of our values. We have tended to cloak all of our traditions in the mantle of values.
As, in retrospect, I did in reacting instinctively and traditionally to the very idea of island ads. Nowadays I notice island ads in the middle of the stock transactions in the St. Petersburg Times. The other day I asked one of that paper’s editors, a journalist who personifies our values, how she felt about island ads. She looked at me as if I’d just awakened from a 20-year snooze, and said the ads were fine, not an issue. The Times doesn’t publish such ads just anywhere, but it is able to charge a premium for island ads where their intrusion is minimal, amid the agate listings. And the premium helps to fund the newsroom’s enterprising journalism.
I still believe in The Wall. It should be low enough to prevent people from trespassing willy-nilly and high enough that thoughtful and creative leaders can collaborate across it, and in doing so can determine how good values influence good businesses.
Was it an abandonment of journalism values to accept an island ad? No. Would it have been a violation of journalism values to share the island ad’s revenue with the subject of the adjacent news content? Yes. We could be a lot sharper at making these distinctions, at defining our values. If journalists do so in the company of the business executives, the business side might better understand—and abet—fighting like hell to safeguard what really matters about covering the news.
