When the journalism industry now talks about deceptive practices it’s talking about fake news that spreads online and the vast credulous public that laps it up. Advertorials—that is, advertising done up to look like it might have come from the editorial department—are a last-century vexation made more palatable by journalism’s crescendoing need to sell any kind of advertising at all.
These profiles are brief and anonymously written, and most are squeezed in two per page. These differences should collectively alert most readers that they’re different—that the Reader and an advertiser agreed to put them here to enhance or complement the staff-produced material, the advertiser might say.
Once upon a time, I might have complained about the print presentation too, but that ethical train has left the station. I look at those eight solid pages of advertising and applaud whatever wheeling and dealing put them there. Reader editorial staffers have complained for years that our owner, the Sun-Times Media Group, was stripping away our own ad salespeople and saddling us with their incompetents. A new VP for business development, Nicki Stanula, began overseeing the Reader as well as the Sun-Times in late summer, and if she can bring in ads like this consistently, at a rate that pays the freight, let her test the bounds of traditional propriety. (Stanula wouldn’t tell me what 900 North Michigan Shops actually paid.)
True, journalism’s front room and back room have been on a first-name basis for a long time. But the advertorial content that no one has the energy to complain about any longer is usually easy to spot and involves secondary material—like sponsored music listings or a restaurant review paid for by the eatery itself.
