TechDirt points out that marketers increasingly have options when they feel they've been worked over by large media outlets, in this case, GM didn't like what Tom Freidman said about them in a recent column (paid reg). But Tom is behind the Times' paywall, and the Times was not willing to give much space to GM's response. So GM went native. From TechDirt's writeup:

Friedman apparently wrote a piece blasting GM. ...GM apparently wrote a 490 word response to the Friedman piece, and submitted it to the NY Times, who rejected it as being "too long" (note that the original article was a clean 800 words). GM actually had to go through a series of negotiations, where they agreed to shorten their response to 200 words ....the NY Times demanded they take out the word "rubbish" in describing Friedman's arguments. So, what does GM do in response? They post the entire story to their own blog, which is probably going to get a lot more traffic and attention than the NY Times' "letters to the editor" would have gotten.