It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town

As the hardreading staff has noted on numerous occasions, the Boston Herald has routinely employed its kissin’ cousin, Boston Herald Radio, as a launching pad for stealth marketing. The digital broadcast platform, which boasts up to several listeners daily, is a convenient venue to interview advertisers, providing content that the Herald has reprinted with diminishing disclosure.

Representative sample from earlier this year:

It’s no accident that you can barely read the “Sponsored Content” disclaimer at the top of the page. That’s how stealth marketing works best.

Now, however, the sneaky local tabloid has gone one step further with its ads in sheep’s clothing, as evidenced by page 3 of today’s edition.

(To be clear graf goes here)

To be clear, both sides of that page are advertisements, despite this attempt to make the left-hand side seem just like  a regular interview.

The Center for Wellbeing clinical director Dr. Jeffrey Donatello joined Boston Herald Radio’s “The Rundown” program yesterday to talk about his company’s use of stem cells in Portsmouth, N.H., to help with arthritis. Here are excerpts . . .

Uh-huh.

(To be fair graf goes here)

To be fair, the web version of the adterview is labeled “Sponsored Content.”

But that doesn’t excuse the lack of disclosure in the print edition, which a lot more people will see.

Moral of the story: When it comes to the stealthy local tabloid, caveat reader.