Minneapolis Star Tribune Sports section lacks buyers--who will pay?

(David Brauer): "I cannot help but commemorate Monday, Feb. 18 — the day the Star Tribune's sports section was 100 percent sponsored by erectile dysfunction potions.

• And not just any ED elixirs — no, these are the special kinds, so mysterious in the ways of the herb that the Food and Drug Administration does not evaluate them! Aspire36, promising you will "Satisfy Her Like Never Before," and Vazopren, the giver of "Maximum Sexual Performance."

....The two quarter-page ads were the only ones in the eight-page section — a truly abysmal percentage that will get journalists agitated in all the wrong ways.

• For the record, the Strib is not alone in taking solicitations for these capsules, or their close cousins, the "instructional" sex tapes. A Google search turned up newspaper ads in Memphis, San Jose and Philadelphia, among others. America is long past its plain-brown-wrapper days — and even if this stuff is quack patent medicine, it is legal (and largely unregulatable, thanks to Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, who's spearheaded laws protecting the state's major herbal remedy industry).

Newspapers do have advertising standards, but I'm hard-pressed to tell you what the Strib's currently are. My repeated queries were funneled to the paper's communications honcho, Ben Taylor, who remained incommunicado....

• ...It's probably logical that as legitimate advertisers drift away, bottom feeders will increasingly share the page with professional journalism. There's irony in that, though some media-haters might regard it as a perfectly natural coupling. In any case, buyer beware."

From article by David Brauer, MinnPost.com, "Sex and the Strib Sports Section," 2/22/08. Via Poynter.org/Romenesko

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