The New York Times today devotes more than a quarter page of prime space on page B3 of its New York editions, including a three-column-wide photograph, to the story of a billboard boat that was hired by an Internet company but then was cited by the City of New York for allegedly violating an ordinance banning such advertising schemes. The Internet company, DIRTPILE.com, faces a fine of probably $1,000, but the value of the publicity it receives today in the Times is at least $20,000, probably more. (Definitely more if you count the secondary effect of articles such as this one.) You can surely expect a spate of Internet companies to follow suit, violating laws and risking fines on the chance that the Times editors will make it worthwhile by, in exchange, contributing some free publicity to the web ventures. If the dot-com executives had shot a police officer in Philadelphia instead of just violating a New York zoning ordinance, they might have even made it onto the Times' front page.
Cheesy: The front of the Times metro section today features an interesting story about a potential move by food regulators to restrict the sale of certain cheeses because of supposed health risks. We're not quite sure what a story about a potential move against a food by federal regulators is doing in the metro section -- it seems like this story would be more at home in the weekly "Dining In, Dining Out" section that deals with food, or in the health section or the business section or even the national section. The story would be better if it had produced a single named victim or family member of a victim who died or got seriously ill as the result of eating unpasteurized-milk cheese. If the federal authorities were unable to produce such a person, it would seem even more obvious than it already does that this is one of these fake health scares that comes along regularly. If there were a bunch of cheese-bacteria illness victims out there with stories to tell, they would lend some human drama and perhaps credibility to the emerging cheese scare.
Real Estate: As if the Sunday Real Estate section and the weekly "House & Home" section don't provide enough space in the Times for coverage of the summer vacation house rental market, the Times metro section provides us with an extended update on that topic today on page B9. News coverage of these matters helps encourage real estate companies to advertise in the Times, but at a certain point the quantity of coverage and the placement of it just becomes silly.