The Wall Street Journal is asking itself why it doesn't run ads on its front page; ads that could bring in tens of millions of dollars per year. And the NYT is trying to leave more green in its jeans by cutting the size of the paper, which will mean a five per cent reduction in the newshole.

An excerpt from the NYT story about the WSJ:

The move is one more sign of the relentless financial pressures that have forced newspapers to consider new ways of raising money — like giving prominence to advertisers in areas of the paper once considered sacred.

Because of The Journal’s prominence and adherence to tradition, the decision could be influential. American newspapers ran front-page ads in bygone days, but in modern times, most have not done so.

USA Today, owned by Gannett, has run a strip ad on the bottom of its front page since 1999, and most Gannett papers also run front-page ads.

Last year, The Journal began selling ads on the front of some of its individual sections and on the front pages of its overseas editions.

This month, The New York Times began selling ads on the front of its business section; the paper had already been selling ads on the front of The Metro Section on Sundays and has run small classified ads on its front page for years. In Britain, front-page ads appear in both The Daily Telegraph and The Financial Times (which is also distributed in the United States).

And here's an excerpt from the NYT story about the NYT:

If the paper only reduced the size of its pages, it would lose 11 percent of that space, but Bill Keller, the paper’s executive editor, said such a loss would be too drastic, so the paper will add pages to make up for some of the loss.

“That’s a number that I think we can live with quite comfortably,” Mr. Keller said of the 5 percent reduction, adding that the smaller news space would require tighter editing and putting some news in digest form.

Several broadsheets — including USA Today, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post — have already reduced their size and others, like The Wall Street Journal, are planning to.

“It’s painful to watch an industry retrench,” Mr. Keller said. “But this is a much less painful way to go about assuring our economic survival than cutting staff or closing foreign bureaus or retrenching our investigative reporting or diluting the Washington bureau.”