More is Not More

On the subject of less is more, the thick newspaper that arrived in my postbox on Monday 9th June, had the dreaded promise, at an official paginagtion of 28 pages, of a very large sponsored section, or what the NYT has now decided should be called Advertising Supplements.

About Nigeria, it took up pages 17-24.

Naturally I, and I presume most IHT readers, didn't even scan it, let alone read it.

Back in the day they weren't afforded the 'status' of book pagination. That is to say, a seperate Roman Numeral pagination would be used, keeping in this case the 'official pagination' at 20 pages. Yet now these 8 pages of pap are given all the glory of a regular news page.

I don't much care for that.

Nor do I care for increasing sloppiness in not clearly identifying text rich advertisements as such. On page 7 was a very 'newsy' looking quater page about www.ruvr.ru - Voice of Russia. It should have been, in my humble opinion, tagged clearly as an advertisement. This type of thing used to SOP; less so now. I don't know why.



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