Ooh ... shiny.

I just visited CNN.com to fill my quarter-hourly need for political information. When did I become this guy? It’s really only happened in the last couple of weeks. My wife told me this week, “I don’t know anything about the news anymore unless you tell me.” Is it that? Is it some sort of responsibility that I have to tell my wife, my friends, and my Twitter followers about the things I think are important or, more often, interesting? I feel like my life has become this giant RSS feed.

(I’m kidding, of course, or at least I don’t believe it when I type it. I’m not that vain. Or I’m not vain enough to type the above without following it up with a parenthetical about how vain I’m not.)

Anyway, over at CNN.com, I spy this photo of Lance Armstrong to the side. He’s surrounded by what appears to be a CNN.com article about him, but reading makes it fairly obvious that it’s an advertisement. There’s also a very, very small, gray word in the lower right corner: “advertisement.” But there also is, just above the photo, in larger and more prominent red font, the phrase “Updated 8 min. ago.”

Holy cow.

We work really hard at Better Software magazine to keep the separation of editorial and advertising as clear as possible. I remember a two-page ad spread that came into the office very late, but which was very important to us because our sales people had worked very hard to get this vendor to advertise with us. Unfortunately, the ad looked like it could’ve been a Better Software article. (There were a lot of other issues with the ad, too, but I’ll stick with the faux article thing for now.) The first thing we did was to put “Advertisement” on the ad. It is best to make an advertisement clear to the eye at first glance. But if someone reads something and questions whether or not it is an ad, it is better to have that word printed clearly on the page.

And so, back to the CNN.com ad. They’ve put advertisement on there, all right. But it is small, and it is light gray. It is meant to disappear. It pretty much defeats the purpose of having it there at all.

And there are other elements meant to trick the eye. “Breaking News,” for instance, and a photo that looks like Lance Armstrong is presenting something to Congress rather than pushing some kind of energy drink. But the one that really ticks me off is the “Updated 8 min. ago.” It is completely unnecessary unless the creators of the ad are going out of their way to make it look just like a genuine CNN story. Which, of course, they are.

Fine. That’s what advertisers are meant to do. Their job is to get your attention long enough to hook your interest so that that you read the ad. Their only job, when all the extra bits are pared out, is to sell you stuff.

But CNN.com’s only job, when submitted to the same paring, is to bring you news. That costs money, and so ads must be sold. But there has to be a line. Otherwise, CNN.com is trying to sell me this energy drink. If I go out and buy the product and don’t like it, that affects my opinion of CNN.com, which told me that Lance Armstrong told Congress (or some other group with a desk and a microphone, and for whom presenters ought to wear suits) that “FRS is the sustained energy choice for me.”

You know how many times in his life Lance Armstrong has said the words “FRS is the sustained energy choice for me” in precisely that order? Probably never.

I’ve been there many times and, believe me, it’s a really, really tough game for the publishing department to play. But this is just ridiculous. The one good thing I can take from it is that I’ve never seen such a blatantly masquerading ad in anything I’ve worked on. CNN.com, it seems, cares less about its readers in this respect than the companies I’ve worked for, and that makes me grateful for the quality of my colleagues.