[icernet] Sponsors ahoy

[Arul Selvan]

The Times of India started the trend of bringing advertising up front 
long ago, and having made its point, and its money, is moving on to push 
the boundary on frontiers that the others have not yet got to. It now 
has an online company called Medianet to negotiate rates for editorial 
space on different sections of the newspaper's online edition. Just as 
the rise of PR has influenced news, the ascendance of media buying as a 
separate service industry is driving the flowering of ads all over the 
media, and the push for unusual positioning on hitherto conservative 
news pages. Minute calculations are gone into to decide where to put a 
client's money. Pushing advertising then, is deadly serious business. 
Maintaining editorial primacy is increasingly a losing proposition.

Source:
http://hinduonnet.com/thehindu/mag/stories/2003021600070300.htm