Inspired by the film Manufacturing Consent we wanted to make the Ads vs News ratio in a New York Times print edition.
Results? Approx 2:1. For every 2 pages of news, there is one page of advertisement.
Related projects to understanding newspapers:
+ Guns, Wars and Terrorism in a real size PageOneX (photo essay)
+ Anatomy of a front page
How to do this?
- Buy two copies of the same edition of one newspaper. You need two copies to be able to display both sides of every page. We used the exterior side of the papers from one copy, and the interior from the other copy.
- To be cautious, we marked (draw a thin line) in the side of the paper that we were not going to use, to avoid having a piece of paper and not do not know which side is the one to use.
- Cut and separate Ads and News.
- Once you have the two piles with Ads and News, you have to make the bar charts. Keep’em straight and make them have the same width. To make the puzzle easier we put all the full (uncut) size pages together at the bottom of the bars.
Anybody up for doing other newspapers?
Some pictures of the process:
Starting to read an cut. 
Rearranging. 
Happy and beautiful people vs other stuff. 
Section A of the newspaper. The ratio is less than 2:1. 
The makers. 
Horizontal style.
Made by Rogelio López @Tochtli_exe and Pablo Rey Mazón @numeroteca.