No, Universal Studios Hollywood hasn't been destroyed. The whole page is a "wrap" ad for Universal's King Kong 360/3-D ride. Kudos to Universal for scoring the ad, and I suppose I should congratulate the LAT ad department for what ought to have been a big payday.
But, as a reader and former employee of the Times, how depressing to watch the paper sell itself out this way. The point of journalism ought to be to inform people, not to jerk them around. I've long had a policy at Theme Park Insider that ads never should cover up the editorial content of the publication. That's why you don't see pop-ups or "takeover" ads crawling across the posts on this site. I'm all for Universal promoting and advertising Kong. But the Times shouldn't be selling Universal fake front pages to do that. Perhaps if the Times cared as much about its readers, the paper wouldn't be in bankruptcy and it wouldn't be hemorrhaging readers and advertisers as it is.
Last year, the Times made a deal to print the Wall Street Journal locally that resulted in the Times having to back up its deadline for the front section of the newspaper to the early evening to accommodate the WSJ press run.
In order to get news that happens after, oh, 5 pm into the LA paper, the Times added a new section, which it called LATEXTRA, for those stories.
As a result, the "traditional" front page tends to be dominated by staff-driven feature and investigative pieces while the actual breaking news ends up in LATEXTRA. (It has to be in all caps to work the pun between LAT-Extra and Late-xtra. LAT being the acronym for the Los Angeles Times.)
So, ultimately, this ad is a sell-out of a sell-out. How very meta.
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