E-Media Tidbits

As my item here yesterday suggests, I have been thinking a bit about the relationship between editorial content and advertising on the Web. Print publications have wrestled with this for years, and have developed a variety of policies, some of which have been updated for Web publishing. For instance: the American Society of Magazine Editors (print and online) and American Business Media (print and online, both in PDF).

The policies address issues such as where ads can be placed, how they should be labeled, and what fonts should and shouldn't be used for advertising. The goal, of course, is to ensure that readers aren't confused about what's editorial and what's advertising.

Until yesterday, I would have said that the Web presents one clear new issue that print-based policies wouldn't address: Web ads, unlike print ads, can actually appear on top of editorial content (as JavaScript pop-ups or rich-media layers). But yesterday I picked up the latest issue of Editor & Publisher, the trade magazine for the newspaper industry, and looked at the cover (click here to see a larger version). It looks like the normal cover for E&P, but something wasn't right. I kept looking and then I realized: It's not the cover, it's an ad! (It's even labeled so, in very small type on the lower left.) When you flip the page, you find the real cover. So ads can appear on top of editorial content in print, too. Not that they should.