The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Ad biz’s Gordon Gekko sees lines blurring between news and ads—and WANTS news biz to shrink

Sy Solomon the imag­i­nary real estate tycoon is pals with the imag­i­nary George McWilliams, exec­u­tive edi­tor of the imag­i­nary Wash­ing­ton Telegram. Along the way, Sy is also one of the Telegram’s biggest adver­tis­ers. But at the very least the news­pa­per in The Solomon Scan­dals cares about the appear­ance of a wall between the edi­to­r­ial and busi­ness sides—the old church-state routine.

In the future, the Telegram actu­ally could look like a paragon of purity. Mar­tin Sor­rell, the British CEO of the U.K.-based WPP Group, per­haps the biggest advertising-related hold­ing com­pany, pre­dicts that ad agen­cies will be get­ting “very much more involved” in con­tent devel­op­ment. He also says, accord­ing to Adver­tis­ing Age, that “the lines between adver­tis­ing and edi­to­r­ial are going to get much more blurred over time whether we like it or not.” This isn’t the­o­ret­i­cal if you extrap­o­late from his company’s past behav­ior and his cur­rent think­ing. “We do, in one mar­ket in Spain, have a minor­ity inter­est in one of the tele­vi­sion chan­nels, and the model is a very inter­est­ing model.”

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