Clara Jeffery at Mother Jones got the New York Times Magazine’s editor, Gerald Marzorati, to break down, via email, the $400K figure he put on Sunday’s Sheri Fink cover story exploring, as Greg previewed last week, “the ‘deadly choices’ made in [Hurricane Katrina’s] wake at New Orleans’s Memorial Medical Center.”
And? Only $40K for lawyers!
Fink’s piece is on the top of my “to read/should have already read” pile (hanging head in shame) but Jeffrey calls it “great,” “the kind of work that is in peril now that the financial underpinnings (i.e. advertising) for journalism have collapsed,” the kind of work that “bloggers and commenters and citizen journalists can’t take on” (although they “can add to it, amplify it, criticize it, and generally run with it.”)
The 2009 4-color open rate for the New York Times magazine is $107,075. So theoretically, four ad pages would pay for the Sheri Fink piece. Five pages and they'd cover the 15% agency commission and start to make some money. However, they can't sell this, and I am almost certain that advertisers, if and when they buy the NYTM, are not paying full rate, more like 60 cents on the dollar.
#1 Posted by Cathy Cranston, CJR on Tue 1 Sep 2009 at 06:53 AM