The long, slow death of The NY Times

NY Times, “Time Warner Plans to Sell 5% of AOL to Google”:

Finally, around 9 p.m., Richard D. Parsons, chief executive of Time Warner told Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, that he would accept Google’s recently sweetened offer. Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before.

Well, that’s kinda distressing. Let’s see what other sources have to say.

LA Times, “Google Poised to Invest $1 Billion in AOL”:

To close the deal, Google made some key concessions.

Its negotiators agreed to promote AOL’s services across Google.com, a change for the company that made famous the sparse white Web page. Google also hired AOL to sell non-search ads to Google’s advertising partners.

Oh, they’re just talking about ad banners, not search results, it sounds like. Let’s look some more.

San Jose Mercury News, “Google buying 5 percent of AOL for $1 billion”:

The partnership could also herald a new experience for people who use Google’s search engine, because it allows AOL to place advertising with images on Google’s search results pages. Until now, Google’s search engine has been devoid of any image ads.

Red Herring, “AOL Talks Just to Google”:

The two will also deepen their advertising relationship. AOL will sell advertising for Google’s search results on AOL’s sites. In return, Google will promote AOL’s sites in the sponsored links in its search results. It will also include AOL’s collection of online videos in its results.

Yep, looks like everyone but the NY Times agrees that they’re talking about ads, not the search results themselves. I think it’s time to just plain stop reading the Paper of Record.