New era brings new balance to two sides of paper's mission

In the inner world of a daily newspaper, the "tell the truth" side of the mission and the "make money" side persist in something of a state of uneasy symbiosis.

Each side knows it can't survive without the other, but each also wishes the other would function more cooperatively somehow. It's not exactly like life in a demilitarized zone, because we do appreciate each other more than typical combatants; maybe it's more like Paul McCartney's ebony and ivory piano keys living together side by side, though not quite in perfect harmony.

So, I have to acknowledge that those of us on the news side of the demarcation point have watched nervously as our siblings on the advertising side edged steadily into territory we had come to think of as reserved for ourselves, taking up more and more space inside the paper, slipping onto the fronts of individual sections and now -- horror of horrors -- onto the front page itself.

For the first time in decades, an advertisement appeared on the front page of the Daily Herald Wednesday. A similar ad will appear Friday, and more are sure to follow.

There was a time when such advertising would be anathema to the typical daily newsroom. We considered it somehow evidence of our immunity to the allure of filthy lucre that we reserved our most-precious space for news and features that were selected without any hint of influence from advertisers or other outside sources.

But as has been well published in recent years, our industry is changing. People are reading newspapers differently today and getting their information and advertising in lots of ways that couldn't be conceived even as recently as five or 10 years ago. So naturally, that changes how we and other newspapers look at our presentation of various elements. Indeed, the Daily Herald is even a bit slow in this regard in the Chicago market. Both major metros began publishing front page ads earlier this year.

So, we, too, have begun to make some space on the front page available for advertising. We have strict guidelines about the ads, of course. The amount of space allowed is limited to a small strip across the bottom, and we will present them in a way that is unobtrusive and does not distract from the importance of the other events and issues covered on the page.

Longtime subscribers may remember back to the early 1990s, when our Neighbor section fronts used to be so loaded with stacked advertising that it was hard to see what news on the page was valuable. Over time, we redesigned those fronts to look more like the section fronts elsewhere in the paper, and even when we did resume allowing ads on them, we restricted them in number and style so that the "make money" portion of the page and the "tell the truth" portion were in a more reasonable balance.

Nor should any of this imply that the news side of the paper doesn't have a role in helping us make money; it does. Or that the advertising side isn't held up to standards of truth and fairness; it is. Yet, there is a distinction between the messages that someone has paid us to publish and those we publish purely because we think you will be interested in them, and we are committed to keeping that distinction clear.

Indeed, that's one point (among many) on which both our news and our advertising people agree. As Paul sang, "We learn to live. We learn to give each other what we need to survive, together alive."

Side by side, but still each with our distinct places in the overall mission of the paper unchanged.