Reading the Japan train wreck story this morning on NY Times and clicked on the slideshow feature. The usual NY Times multimedia presentation intro screen came up, followed by an animated advertisement. There was an option to skip the ad, which I did. This feature has never bothered me - as much as I don’t like online advertisements, the newspaper has to earn money somewhere. But today I found it inappropriate, and it almost reflects badly on the Times to be showing advertisements before photos of the tragedy. While this is part of the online publishing system and not by choice of the editors, I think it offers a bad experience for the readers. Probably not a big deal, but I think it can be easily fixed with an option in the content entry system to not have an ad before the presentation.