Bill Crow, the stalwart bassist and indispensable jazz anecdotist, comments on the Rifftides posting about the separation of reporting from advertising.
I’m glad you brought up the news/advertising issue in newspapers. And it isn’t just the advertisers…it’s the editors. I rely on The New York Times for a lot of the information I want, but I’m afraid it isn’t the paper it once was. There seems to be a new editorial policy to make the front page more entertaining. There are hardly any straight news stories any more. Everything is written with a byline, and with a personal slant. It bugs me to have to wade through three paragraphs of cute writing in a news story before I can find out what happened.
Every day or so, the Times notes in its Corrections department a mistake that was made “due to an editing error.” They’ve got to find this editor and stop him before he edits again!