"Chinese Wall" separating editorial copy and advertising thriving at the Post Bulletin

Bluestem gets a lot of fun email from vendors pitching products, but today's email brings what may well be the funniest email we've ever gotten from a "Senior Digital Media Consultant Marketing & Advertising Professional | Digital/Online | Mobile | SEO" type. 

Out of kindness, we're redacting the name, but sharing the request:

Sally,

My name is [redacted] and I am with the Post-Bulletin newspaper in Rochester, MN. I work with our online/digital products. We have 330,000 unique visitors per month, accessing over 2.8 million pages on our site. The great part is that we reach over 130,000 people at the Mayo Clinic. This is a great market to reach- the majority are young, affluent, and educated. We have some really inexpensive ways to reach the public through our online paper.  I am not sure if you are the right person, but I was wondering if you would be so kind as to point me in the direction of the person who handles the advertising for Allen Quist?

Thank you,

Well, no, Bluestem Prairie is a left-leaning website run by a poor country blogger.  We're not the Quist campaign.

However absurd this request is, it does build confidence that the "Chinese Wall" that's supposed to separate editorial and news copy from advertising and marketing is fully intact at the Post Bulletin. Jay Furst and Heather Carlson would certainly never ask us this question. Indeed, Carlson would know enough to call the campaign directly if she were doing a story about advertising.

Any questions for the campaigns, elected officials, and other entities we write about should be directed to those campaigns. This ain't no receptionist's desk.

Photo: The Great Wall of China.

Comments

[Phoenix Woman]

Must have been "let's prank the new employee over at the marketing desk" today at the Post Bulletin. Wonder if they sent her on a snipe hunt afterward?