The abysmal advertising and circulation numbers of the Times were an unfortunate joke.
No one on the editorial side of the newspaper could understand why the Times’ total classified advertising was no more than one or two pages a day while The Washington Post’s Saturday edition alone had five or six sections of classified ads totaling more than 100 pages.

Also the large ads from ideological zealots were an embarrassment to people in the newsroom. For example, the paper published 30 ads from 2004 onwards from neo-Nazi Stan Rittenhouse, head of a group called Exhorters that has a white-supremacist web site called Stormfront.

Why would any pacesetting newspaper accept such ads, let alone be dependent on them?

How the owners of the Times tolerated the lack of sales by its advertising and circulation staffs for so many years was a complete mystery to us in the newsroom. The Times’ advertising hole was less than almost any tiny suburban paper in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Even the give-away Washington Examiner tabloid, which started in 2005, had more advertising and circulation on its first day than the Times had built up over almost a quarter century.