The Globe and Mail is currently negotiating a new contract with its employee union, and if management gets its way some of the newspaper’s journalists will soon be writing advertorials.
According to Unifor, which is negotiating with the Globe on behalf of its members, both sides have made their respective pitches. One of those proposals is “Giving management the right to assign editorial employees to write and edit advertorial copy as part of their regular duties,” according to a negotiation document the union released to J-Source.
Advertorials have always been an odd part of newspapers. They are advertisements that are made to look like regular articles and often poorly labelled, meaning a lot of readers will mistake them for real news. Advertorials have always been ethically dubious, but the one rule no newspaper dared break was that advertising and editorial should never mix.
If the Unifor document is legitimate, and there is no reason to suspect otherwise, this would represent a major violation of that norm. These are some pretty dark times in Canadian journalism.
[via J-Source][image: The Albatross]