Categories: OLD Media Moves

Sunday business column replaced with ad last two weeks

Salt Lake Tribune reader advocate Connie Coyne writes Saturday about how Jeff Opdyke’s “Love & Money” column in the Sunday business section has been replaced the last two weeks with advertisments.

Coyne wrote, “Business Editor Michael Limon agrees that running the promo headline on the front of the Money section and then failing to print the column is a disservice to readers.Â

“But this time, the fault does not lie with anyone in the newsroom.Â

“The Wall Street Journal sells us a package of two pages’ worth of material for the Sunday paper. There are blank spaces where local ads can be placed by folks at Newspaper Agency Corp. (the company owned by The Tribune and the Deseret Morning News that prints, sells the ads and delivers the papers).Â

“Something went awry, however, and as Deputy Editor Tim Fitzpatrick explains, ‘A locally sold advertisement was placed over the column, so readers could not find it.Â

“‘The short answer is that [NAC] put a local ad over the column two weeks in a row,’ Fitzpatrick says.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.