How to Read the NY Times

The last time I read the New York Times everyday for an extended period was 1968, my last year of active duty. I had a boring job with nothing to do. Part of my job was to supervise two NCO’s and a few airmen who also had nothing to do. The New York Times was a lifesaver. It took all morning to read. Since I was the captain, I got first dibs. I would begin at 8:30am with a cup of coffee and read every word. The big paper would take me up until around 11am when I could break for lunch. Mondays were particularly good as we had Sunday’s huge edition as well as the Monday paper. I have always been fond of the NY Times for helping me through that long, long year. I still check their on-line edition each day. But the on-line version is nothing like the hard copy. For one thing you can’t see those full page ads, the broadsheets. These ads, the full page ones, are the most interesting part of the paper. Some days are better than others. Today, for example, there is only one full page ad which touts Farrah Fawcett’s show debuting this evening. Last week my favorite full page ad was for a conservation group which is trying to drum up public support to force the new owner of the historic Plaza Hotel to save the public rooms from his planned condo development. The full page ads tell an interesting story through the week. On Sunday, of course, there are broadsheets for the new movies and for department stores—Macy’s, Lord and Taylor, etc. A full page ad in the Times starts at around $24,000. Four color process can increase this into the mid thirty thousand range. You have to be serious to spend this kind of dough. Telephone companies must have lots of money. The broadsheets often advertise cellphones. Yesterday, for example, Cingular touted the fact that they have the largest free mobile to mobile community. I was surprised to learn that there are 48 million of us Cingular/ATT types calling each other for free. I wonder how long this will be allowed to continue? You can almost imagine the top executives of Cingular brainstorming ways to renege on that deal. Not to be outdone, Sprint has an eye-catching watercolor rendering of a golf fairway and green. They are bragging up their partnership with the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) and claiming that, “With Sprint, business is beautiful.” I didn’t quite see how golf and cellphones mix though I have played with people who talked on the phone while I was trying to hit and that isn’t so beautiful. The nonprofit ads are often the most interesting. The Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund is soliciting donations with their ad because they want to give $11,000 to each spouse and $5,000 to each dependent of fallen heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan. They report that 1000 children have been left without a mother or father. $11,000 doesn’t seem like much though I understand it’s more than the government benefit. Financially, it turns out to have been better to have been a fallen hero at the World Trade Center than a dead soldier in a Bush war. The dependents of 911 heroes are collecting sums in the millions. Another nonprofit is Water Advocates whose full page ad exhorts the reader to do something about the world’s bad water. The headline in large letters is, “I Thirst.” Then they explain that, “Each day water-related diseases kill 3,900 of the world’s children.” Water Advocates is dedicated to increasing American support for safer water world wide. The NY Times bought an ad for itself, or maybe it was free. They want college students to “Network to enrich your college experience.” To do this you go to http://www.nytimes.com/college. Pharmaceutical companies have huge ad budgets. GlaxoSmithKline, a large pharma says, “Breathe easier for free.” You take their asthma control test then ask your doctor if Advair is right for you? Then, maybe, you can take advantage of a free trial offer. Another pill tease. UBS  (wealth management, global asset management, investment bank) asks us in their full pager to “Imagine a global financial firm with the heart and soul of a two-person organization.” Tried for a couple minutes, but wasn’t able to do this. And, finally, a broadsheet almost demands that we read, “The unforgettable new novel by the author of Enduring Love and Atonement. Ian McEwan. Saturday. A magnificent novel.” Now that’s an author who is getting some support. They’ll have to sell about 10,000 books just to pay for the ad.
If your eyes are tired you can still gets lots of information from those great big full page ads in the NY Times.