'Scholastic' Keeps Cover Ads Despite ASME Slap

No word yet from the American Society of Magazine Editors on what, if anything, it has to say about ESPN The Magazine's latest cover, which features an advertisement that certainly seems to challenge the group's guidelines on ad/edit separation.

But ASME is coming down hard, or at least as hard as it ever does, on Scholastic Parent & Child magazine, which tossed the guidelines out the window altogether in putting a clearly-labeled, not-at-all-coy ad on its April cover.

ASME CEO Sid Holt calls the ad "a black-and-white violation" and says the society "is taking the appropriate action," which could extend to banning Scholastic Parent & Child from competing in the annual National Magazine Awards until it mends its ways. And that's not happening anytime soon: "We intend to continue running cover ads," says editor Nick Friedman.

(Friedman didn't say whether S P&C submitted materials for this year's award judging, but I'm told it did.)

Holt also had this to say about why ASME bothers to maintain that magazine covers -- unlike, say, the front pages of newspapers, must be exclusively devoted to editorial, a question I considered recently:

In regard to the cover, the guidelines reflect longstanding industry practice -- longstanding as in two and a half centuries. ASME believes that the cover makes magazines a unique and powerful medium, that it is most effectively used as a tool for editors and circulators to communicate directly with readers and that it is in the best interests of everyone concerned about the strength of the medium to keep it that way.