The Boston Sunday Globe featured a Special Section – UMass 150 – that celebrated the 150th anniversary of the University of Massachusetts system, “a five-campus university, with a medical school, and locations to the north, the south, and one perched right on the Boston waterfront.”
Not to mention perched right in the Globe newsroom.
Front cover:
Page 3 featured a letter (labeled “Advertisement”) from UMass Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy:
The thing is, the whole magazine should have been labeled “Big Wet Kiss.” But it wasn’t.
Sample spreads:
All those pompoms are bad enough. But here’s the other problem:
Ideally, if you’re going to lease your editorial pages to an advertiser, you have the good sense to farm all the content out to freelancers.
Not here.
(Hey, Globeniks: Leave it to the Hessians next time, eh?)
So far, this isn’t the equivalent of the Los Angeles Times kerfuffle back in 1999, when the paper had a profit-sharing arrangement with the Staples Center on a special issue about the sports facility.
But it’s early times, yeah?
Campaign Outsider 
Whoever did the music for their first few series of TV ads with Cosby, Welch, Abboud, etc., a few years ago is a genius. Of course, he was no Globe writer.
John Silber is probably spinning in his grave, which is the only upside that I can see. Isn’t UMass a public university, supported by taxpayer dollars . . . that are now being funnelled to the top opinion maker in the region? Why isn’t the Herald all over this with FOIA’s, columns, exposes etc.?
Give ’em time, Bob. They might go for it yet.