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The New York Times today unveiled a major redesign of its website. Readers will never again have to click to read the second half of a story, and the site is crafted to appeal to a mobile audience. As NPR's David Folkenflik reports, the Times' digital redesign has also embraced a somewhat controversial shift in journalism - some posts on the site that look similar to articles reported and written by people working for the paper's advertisers.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: The practice is sometimes called native advertising or branded content. The idea is that there is content - maybe in the form of an article, maybe something else - created by or for an advertiser. Stephanie Losee is a former Fortune magazine writer who is now computer-maker Dell's managing editor of global communications. She oversees a stable of writers and identifies the engine driving this dynamic.
STEPHANIE LOSEE: Brands have the privilege now of speaking directly to their audiences.
FOLKENFLIK: In the digital age, Losee says, advertisers have a lot of options.
LOSEE: Brands no longer had to rely exclusively on traditional publishers to gather audiences around content. We weren't calling it content at the time but that's what they were doing so that brands could advertise to those audiences.
FOLKENFLIK: Now, Dell and other corporations will pay for articles they have commissioned to appear on The New York Times site - advertising intended to burnish awareness of a company rather than hawk its wares. This is no longer a luxury or an experiment, other papers are already in the game. Newspapers have lost ground to Twitter and Facebook and other social media platforms where sponsored tweets and postings appear as part of the user's daily stream. For The Times, the move has required great care. Michael Zimbalist is the senior vice president for advertising products at The New York Times.
MICHAEL ZIMBALIST: We've put a lot of attention into how we're going to make it really clear to you as a reader of The New York Times that that story is, in fact, coming from a brand. And that begins with the name. We arrived at the name Paid Post, which we're very happy about.
FOLKENFLIK: The word paid underscoring that someone paid for it, the word post suggesting it's content that could be worthwhile. The material from Dell runs in similar font as the paper's articles. But as Zimbalist says, it's very clearly marked with corporate logos and the legend paid for and posted by Dell at the top of the page.
ZIMBALIST: Expertise can come from anywhere and great stories can come from all kinds of unexpected places. One of those places will be from brands.
FOLKENFLIK: There are risks to imbedding corporate content, as The Atlantic found when it posted a sponsored article from the Church of Scientology that celebrated its history and airbrushed the many controversies that have dogged the organization. It seemed inconsistent with the nature of the magazine, which promised to take greater care differentiating original and paid material.
Critics say that ambiguity is the point for many advertisers who are willing to pay if they can borrow the reputation of the news sites. But take BuzzFeed. The site's founder, Jonah Peretti, says his company's approach is inspired by fashion magazines like Vogue or the Super Bowl. Without the ads, he says, they'd be a lot less entertaining.
JONAH PERETTI: Now, some people, I think, actually don't like the fact that our ads are good quality or that the ads are interesting, particularly when you think about the period where newspapers were mostly monopolies. And they could make huge amount of money without ever really spending any time or attention on the advertising.
FOLKENFLIK: BuzzFeed's digital traffic now far exceeds that of The New York Times or CNN, and sometimes sponsored posts go viral, too. But a reader quickly skimming them might skip by the small corporate logo and the label stating they were written by a, quote, "BuzzFeed partner." There are echoes here of past print advertising approaches. For example, some regional papers farm out their real estate sections to marketing employees rather than reporters. Foreign governments have paid for special sections to appear in newspapers touting their countries. As Zimbalist of The New York Times says, what's old is new again.
David Folkenflik, NPR News, New York.