Why isn’t this marked as an advertisement? You may have comp’ed it to Fleishman because he’s a BB editor, but it’s still an ad.
But where do you draw the line? Do you similarly mark all of Cory’s book-publicity posts, Mark’s Maker-related posts, etc.?
It’s a content partnership: we’re bringing features to Boing Boing and they’re pointing readers to our site (which has both free and paid content). We’d love for people to subscribe, but we’re hardly selling widgets.
This week, Elisabeth Eaves’ Malta/submarine story ran in full on Boing Boing, for instance.
That doesn’t make it not-an-advertisement. The article reprint itself isn’t an ad (although there’s no reason to push it into the BB site when it could have been a link to the outside URL), but “The latest from The Magazine: Living New Deal, Old Bones, Body-Part Modeling, and More” is certainly an ad, no different from HP buying space.
I see your point, although I do think there’s a distinct difference between creator-controlled, independent, everybody-gets-paid projects (a la Kickstarters or Boing Boing for that matter) and, like, HP.
We pay writers well, we take care with their words, we love readers and listen to them, and to make the whole thing happen, we need subscribers to fund it. I don’t mean to be squishy here, since it is a for-profit operation, but we’re more in a patronage mold, in the style of pre-advertising magazines and zines.
If we were Big Media, this would be a different complexion. But it’s just me, a pile of freelancers (some of whom write for Boing Boing as well), and a model in which we’re trying to fund interesting stories and issue at a time, and pay the rent.
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