There’s a lot you can learn about Susan Fournier, dean of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, from her April 2022 and March 2023 cover stories in CIO Views magazine.
You can learn that Fournier is “an award-winning researcher with an in-depth knowledge of what it takes to produce ‘research that matters.’” You’ll discover she’s “using strategic foresight to make Questrom the business school of the future.” What’s more, she has “advanced the value of interdisciplinary interfaces,” although it’s a little unclear what that means. Ditto the description of the business school’s goal “to be distinctive in digital business while interfacing with the parallel world.”
“Her team at BU Questrom believes that Susan’s courage has gotten them through the best and the worst of times and that she should be lauded for it,” one of the stories says. Evidently proud of her first CIO Views profile, that team wrote about it on Questrom’s in-house publicity website, under “Media Mention.” Fournier tweeted about it too: “Excited to share my perspective in @CIOViews.”
There is one critical detail that the CIO Views stories leave out, however. They don’t say that they’re advertisements, paid for by BU’s business school.
All the stories in CIO Views are paid for, a salesperson for the magazine confirmed. That’s despite the fact that none of the stories are labeled as such, and the publication in many ways presents as independent and journalistic. In neatly laid-out digital issues, there are letters from the editor. There are more obvious ads throughout, too, some for well-known brands, although a spokesperson for one company, Nissan, confirmed that it did not actually place the ad that appears in one recent issue. (Other companies didn’t answer questions about their ads in time for this story, but some ads seem outdated and one had “lorem ipsum” filler text.)
Continue Reading