A few weeks ago, Forbes had an article, "Newspapers confront the enemy within," that examined the changing relationship between the editorial and advertising departments — a relationship that I believe most B2B editors will agree changed a long time ago in our world. The gist of the article was that editors are having to take an active role in the money-making part of the business instead of just the content-producing side of things and how it's a difficult cultural leap.

And it is. Many of us went to journalism schools in which the separation between editorial content and sales was a line that was drawn with blood and shall never be crossed. And that's true. Editorial is not in the business of selling ads, but there is no reason it should not be in the business of better educating its sales team on the value proposition of the product they are selling. Nor should it mean that editors and salespeople shouldn't brainstorm on ideas that might be beneficial to both advertisers and readers. The line is still there — a reader should easily be able to distinguish content that is editorially driven without advertiser input and ads or advertorials.

Which brings me to two semi-related items: Both Paste magazine and Bon Appetit recently tried two new ads out that seem to be straddling that line. In Bon Appetit's case, Starbucks purchased the masthead in the May issue, and alongside the masthead's names were quotes from that person about Starbucks products. The page was labeled promotion and was made to look like a Starbucks chalkboard.

The second is Paste magazine, which ran BMW ads down at the bottom next to the page number, in the place where normally a magazine's folio information would go. The ads featured a BMW and a fact that coincided with the page number that ad ran (i.e, on page 32: "Inches of legroom in the rear of the all-new BMW 1 Series Coupe.").

I wonder how comfortable any of you would be if approached by an advertiser to run this type of promotion or how you feel about working with your sales staff.

Labels: Advertising, Bon Appetit, editorial, Forbes, Paste magazine

Trying to wrap your head around Search Engine Optimization? Not sure what keywords have to do with your writing? Then click over to CopyBlogger and set yourself a RSS feed.

I forget how I came across the site, but it's become one of my favorites lately. From posts like how to create a blog that people will want to Digg to how not to commit grammar errors that make you look dumb, the site has a lot of easy-to-digest information.

Labels: editorial

Anyone who has worked in publishing—especially B2B, where there is such a close relationship between the PR people and editors—has felt as Kurt Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, does, that enough is enough already, and there are certain PR people whose e-mails will no longer be accepted. I know once my last company got Caller ID, there were several phone numbers I ignored because of phone abuse—calling repeatedly, one call right after the other without leaving a message until I was afraid that something had happened to a loved one; turned out, a PR person needed an editorial calendar—that number never got picked up again.

But did Kurt go too far by publishing e-mail addresses of the PR people he felt abused the e-mail system? There’s an interesting debate on his blog in the comments that followed, and I think some have at least one valid point: If we as editors are going to be upset fielding calls from PR people about subjects someone else on our staff covers, we had better make it darn easy to figure out the correct person by having it clearly denoted on our Web sites. But it’s also a two-way street. If PR people really want to get their clients’ companies into our pages, they had better do their homework first and pick up a magazine to ensure that you put in personnel changes before contacting you about it.

Any thoughts?

Labels: B2B, e-mails, editorial, Kurt Anderson, public relations, Wired