Sun Sentinel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning daily newspaper, wants to give you wood.
If you happened to open up the paper this morning -- maybe browsing the news with a cup of coffee at the kitchen table while your precious, innocent kids eat Cheerios -- you might have noticed a banner ad at the bottom featuring... a smoldering sex vixen.
"I'M READY, ARE YOU?" the text blares. The ad, for Maxim Men's Clinic, promises "ERECTIONS FROM 30 MIN - 2 HOURS." "WHEN YOU COME TO OUR CLINIC, YOU GET FIRM."
Right there. On the front page. Of a large-circulation daily newspaper.
"30 minute erections?" a friend of ours -- not us, a friend -- wonders. "What do I do with the other 29 minutes and 58 seconds?"
Now, first and foremost, YES, this is the pot calling the kettle black. You flip through New Times, you'll find ad for just about every strip club and transsexual Asian massage service in town. But at least we keep that stuff in the back of the paper.
Of course, this isn't the first time the Pulitzer Prize-winning Sun Sentinel has revealed a gutter sensibility. A couple of months back, its website was running click-bait slide shows featuring celebrity cleavage, among other things. But laying aside front-page real estate for a provocative boner ad is really some next-level stuff.
Everybody needs to get those ad revenues, uh, up. But 1A is a sacred, important place. Let's keep the borderline NSFW stuff in the back, guys. This is a newspaper, not an alt-weekly.
Of course, the front-page ad isn't slipping by readers. From the Tweet machine:
It's a classy ad RT @rsm: Hey @SunSentinel, I love y'all, but this ad on 1A is, well ... http://t.co/ARP9Ketm7m pic.twitter.com/hWb7WXupDt
— Josh Crutchmer (@jcrutchmer) May 7, 2014@SunSentinel @ must need a couple bucks, lets do a fund rsiser lmbo
— Kenneth Chaplin (@luckykc040) May 7, 2014Keep staying classy, guys.
UPDATE: The paper's Publisher Howard Greenberg tells Romenesko that the ad was an "honest mistake." It was supposed to run in the sports section. Oops. Good thing they've got all those layers of editorial oversight.
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