Can you pay Fairfax to get columns?

I saw a column at Stuff by the executive director of UNICEF NZ supporting a Andrew Little’s bill on requiring all rental houses to have insulation and heating.

Down the bottom it noted:

This article was supplied as part of Stuff’s partnership with Unicef NZ. UNICEF stands up for every child so they can have a childhood. Find out more at unicef.org.nz

So what is this partnership:

We’ve just launched a partnership with Unicef NZ that we’re pleased to be able to tell Stuff readers about.

Unicef NZ has some compelling stories to tell around improving child welfare. We’ll be able to help shine a light on those issues – and Unicef will be able to help us with access and resources to tell the stories of children, families and communities afflicted by disaster, poverty, and violence, both around the world and here in New Zealand.

This arrangement – which starts as a trial for six months – won’t affect the independence of our journalism. We’ll continue to make our editorial decisions based on news merit, and we remain free to criticise Unicef NZ or its activities if that’s justified. When we use material supplied by Unicef, it will be clearly credited.

This strongly suggests that it is a commercial partnership, and that Unicef NZ pays Fairfax and in returns Fairfax prints columns for them.

If this is the case (and their statement is so opaque it is hard to know), then they should clearly mark columns provided as advertorial, not editorial.