This is something the Louisville Courier-Journal, also Gannett, has been doing, too.

With everything else on that page, the big football tease, the rail full of teases with art, the 3 breakout boxes, the 2 photos and graphic is the cat even that effective at grabbing people's attention?

If you regularly run the same strip add with the same intrusive element aren't readers going to eventually tune it out?

Ew. Eww. Ewww. Ewwww.

You know, our front page strip ads don't seem quite so intrusive now that I've seen this.

This made people here wince, loudly.

The Star Press (Gannett paper in Muncie, IN) did this a month or two ago with big Chevy trucks. And they did it like two or three days straight.

"make it pop!"

ugh...

i just can't wait for some unfortunate juxtaposition of editorial and advertising.

Money, money, money...!They have to pay huge payroll, and huge designer payroll too., so go ahead! by the way is not that bad, look good, attractive, or not!!

I'd say there's a slight juxtaposition on that C-J front. "Ex-firefighter now on the receiving end of help" has a photo of a guy with his hand cupped to his ear jutting into it. Is that the guy hearing the call for help?

The other thing is this... at what point will those ads start dictating how front-page news is presented? I wonder if the people who sell ads or make decisions about these ads realize they're impacting in some way how 1A news decisions are made? So much for a separation between advertising and news coverage, right?

I know this is a business, and I appreciate said concerns, but at what point have we sold our newspapers' souls? When we appear to be in advertisers' pockets, we'll lose our readership, and the advertisers will go where the readers go. Integrity is the one thing we can't afford to let slip away.

Both of these oddly-shaped ads could have been handled much better, in ways that didn't need to blur any editorial-ad lines or jeopardize the papers' immortal souls. It'd be a matter of squaring off the copy above the heads of the cat and the listening people and running a very short story or some refers to fill in the holes.

I just got back from a vacation in Spain (which explains why I'm getting to this thread so late). I saw a lot of newspapers, they all had ads on their front pages, and many of them ran island ads, triangular ads or tiny ads, maybe an inch wide, that wrapped from the front page to the back page on the spine of a tab.

They didn't always look good, but not once did I think those ads blew the papers' credibility out of the water. At times, the writing took care of that, and so did some unlabeled copy that looked an awful lot like advertorial, but those are separate issues.