“One of the things I think newsrooms have to realize,” Anger told the Journal, “is we’re here to cover the news in an unvarnished way, but we’re also here to facilitate commerce.”

SHOOT: Those are mutually exclusive, contradictory goals. Sorry. One is a public service, the other is a private service.

Back in the good old days of 2007—just before the relentless storms of circulation declines, revenue plunges, layoffs, buyouts, dwindling news holes, and shrinking news pages made such a consideration an unaffordable luxury—one of the most agonizing questions facing many newspapers was whether to put display ads on their front pages.

By early 2009, the agonizing question for most papers had become whether there would continue to be a front page at all.

clipped from www.cjr.org The Los Angeles Times provoked gasps last April when it took the once-controversial idea of front page advertising one misstep further. The financially strapped paper ran an ad thinly disguised as a news story in the body of its front page—an “innovative” concept it had pitched to NBC for the TV drama Southland. Yesterday, the even more beleaguered Detroit Free Press apparently took an even more dramatic leap toward shrinking the gap between news and commerce. At the suggestion of health insurer and advertiser Humana Inc. the paper prepared and ran a package of stories centered on senior health and the upcoming Medicare open enrollment period, according to The Wall Street Journal. Ads in the section also were sold to other advertisers. Others, however, have crossed the line that divides “savvy money-making strategy” from “totally improper behavior for a respected newspaper.” And they’ve often been quickly—and harshly—reprimanded for their transgressions.