Support for those needy article tools

If you’ve been on NYTimes.com lately, you may have noticed that all the “article tools”—the links that let you e-mail a story to a friend or reformat it for printing—are currently being “sponsored” by the DVD release of Kinsey. This probably isn’t a new thing, but isn’t it kind of silly? Certainly it’s a nice spot for an ad—within the editorial area and all. But a sponsorship? Do article tools really need sponsors? Will they really go under without corporate backing? Don’t they sort of operate automatically through a software program—unlike, say, a concert series, a sporting event or a philanthropic organization, which might actually be worth putting one’s money into and logo on?