LA Times Front Page for Rent

Wow -- reporting on itself, the Los Angeles Times says:

Amid a steep decline in revenue, the Los Angeles Times is planning to break with long-standing tradition by selling ads on its front page, Publisher David Hiller said Friday.When it happens, the newspaper will be the largest metropolitan paper in the country to place ads there.

[...]

The ads would be confined to the "brand-and-image" category, he said. As contemplated, an ad would be a 1 1/2 -inch "strip" across the bottom of the page.

[...]

Employees in the Times newsroom circulated a petition Friday exhorting the publisher to reconsider."Page One has traditionally been sacrosanct among American newspapers," said Alan Mutter, a media investor and online commentator who used to be a newsroom executive with the San Francisco Chronicle. But with newspapers facing increasingly stiff competition from Internet-based news and entertainment sources, the industry has been scrambling to cut costs and find new sources of revenue, Mutter said, noting that the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle and numerous other papers have been selling front-page ads for months."It's now become perfectly acceptable, just as not running stock tables in the business section and not having foreign bureaus is acceptable," he said.

I suggest you save a copy of your local newspaper -- soon -- so you can show your grandchildren an example of what people used to read back in the 20th Century.

(Via Howard Kurtz's Media Notes column at the Washington Post)