Charles Apple

The ongoing creep of advertising into what was once the territory of newshole seems to have taken another beachhead this weekend — this according to a blogger for the Minneapolis Star Tribune who was most displeased today to find this in his Sunday Strib:

That’s Andrew Ecklund’s digital photo; we just cleaned it up a bit.

Ecklund — an e-commerce expert who blogs as a citizen journalist for the Star Tribune — writes today:

I doubt I was the only person this morning scratching his head, wondering what this Target “story” had to do with the federal budget. It didn’t dawn on me until further study that the Target material was simply an ad, having nothing to do with the story. Once I realized what had happened, I was rather put out.

Times are desperate for newspapers. I recognize that. From printing the classifieds upside-down to now embedding advertising into editorial content, I think the industry has jumped the shark…

I hope today’s ad placement was an honest mistake, and I’m writing this blog post as an invitation to the paper to set the record either straight or explain to us their reasoning.

Strong words. Mr. Ecklund isn’t aware, apparently, this has been going on at other papers for quite some time.

Got to admit, though, the Obama example he shows seems awfully extreme.

Find Ecklund’s piece here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 3:48 pm and is filed under Industry woes, News design, Visual ethics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.