Is the Washington Post making any money off of ‘Top Secret America’?

I really like the package that the Washington Post put together for its ‘Top Secret America’ series by Dana Priest and William Arkin (with help from a bevvy of other WaPo staffers). But given how much attention was ladled onto how the story was delivered, it’s quite a surprise that the Washington Post doesn’t appear set to earn much money off of it.

We first learned last week that WaPo held the story for Monday, rather than Sunday, to maximize the web traffic it would produce. And it certainly has received that kick – a cursory review of Washington Post’s ‘The Most’ shows that many of the website’s highly-engaged readers were e-mailing the story around like crazy. And with the story parked yesterday on high-traffic homepages like the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, the story was certain to get a lot of multi-pageview click-through.

But all those readers aren’t getting much in the way of advertising message from the revenue providers who help keep the lights on at 15th Street, NW. Lauren Keane’s entry on the Top Secret America blog (which has a big Sprint advertisement down its right-hand side) describes the Washington Post’s new ‘immersive reading experience’ that allows users to “page horizontally through our stories and view photos, video and graphics without leaving the package.” But to engage the ‘immersive reading experience’ on my 15-inch MacBook Pro screen, I have to scroll down past the standard banner ad at the top of the page. Then as I click through any of the stories, videos, and databases, I am not at any moment confronted with an advertisement popping up in my field of view (Addendum: Save for a small box of text links buried beneath Priest and Arkin’s bios).

Maybe the Washington Post wants to preserve some modicum of purity in its Pulitzer Prize-grade coverage of duplication and mismanagement in the intelligence community. If that’s why the ‘immersive reading experience’ is ad-free, it’s reminiscent of the ‘news under glass in a museum‘ approach that I’ve criticized before. If you spend all this time and effort preparing a big story that isn’t controlled by the vagaries of the meme-chasing internet news cycle, and even come up with an innovative way to deliver it, you should also find a way to pay for it. If shows prepared in the public interest for PBS can have underwriters, surely the Post could have selected a suitable, conflict-of-interest-free advertiser for the scores of repeat visitors reading this story yesterday, today, tomorrow, and in the weeks ahead.