And so the author, Nolan Hamilton, proceeded to attempt to land some paying advertisers. However, he noticed something about the process:
"I could feel the focus of my mind turning to the question of how to sell ads. I could feel my mental energy being allocated to questions of finance and marketing. This is bad. I only have a certain amount of mental energy and focus to begin with. Every bit of it that is being used to figure out how to sell ads is not being used to think about what I am writing here."

This is precisely why (well-run) magazines have a THICK IMPENETRABLE wall between writers/editors and sales/marketing team. Of course, on top of that organization are people who understand that the money brought in by the sales team pays for the writers and editors, so there's some spillover pressure ANYWAY.

Journos with integrity ignore that. Others (cough, cough BM), don't, and see their quality go down the drain accordingly. #1449095

ah, yes, I should finish reading before commenting:

Hamilton points out that newspapers and publishers have long dealt with this problem. They have an advertising team and an editorial team and supposedly there is a wall between the two. Of course, a wise person might question how meaningful such a wall is. We all tend to know on which side our bread is buttered and if we try to ignore that information, it has a way of intruding on our lives.