Two weeks before megapublisher Time Inc. is spun off from Time Warner as a public company, two of its premiere titles have started selling small ads on their covers, under the barcode or subscriber tag, Ad Age reports, industry standards be damned. “You can either say this is a groundbreaking decision to put ads on covers after 91 years in the business or you can say this is a relatively modest reference that catches up to what’s going on in the industry,” said the company’s chief content officer Norman Pearlstine. “What we didn’t want to do is to be perceived that we trying to hide from it.” Magazines going the way of NASCAR vehicles or soccer jerseys could very well be the future of journalism. Who knows!
