News-Record.com

The Sun's approach might never work in America, but Ponce de Leon envisions a day -- perhaps in the next few years -- when U.S. newspapers regularly report and comment on pornography, which generates $12 billion a year in revenue in this country. The most explicit stories might only appear on a paper's Web site, not in print, he said, but their presence would be publicized to the paper's wider readership.

That's from a column in the San Francisco Chronicle, headlined: "Newspapers turn to sex and celebs: Publications employ titillation in their pages and on their Web sites to lure back readers." (Via the Blogging Journalist.)

It uses the papers in Great Britain, with their Page 3 girls and lingerie models, as examples of a sexy future.

Is that what you want?

We've generally avoided the celeb culture because we know we can't compete with Entertainment Tonight and the Insider, to say nothing of all the Web sites devoted to it. We haven't tried to compete with the semi-nudes and topless models because, among many reasons, that's not what our subscribers are buying us for. (On the other hand, if we published those sorts of photos, we'd have a different subscriber base, that's for sure.)

How can we compete with/on the Internet on naked women?

The one important point the SFGate article doesn't address: Newspaper advertisers are traditionally conservative. The big ones, at least around here, shy away from the sorts of content that will be controversial. It is fun, though, to imagine the sorts of advertiser adjacencies we might sell.