Advertising and Journalism

Abstract

News is produced primarily to inform readers and viewers. However, audiences are charged only a fraction of the high production costs or not asked to pay at all. The reason is subsidy by advertising revenue. Since the beginning of professional journalism, news has been bundled with advertisements. This way, media companies can sell the attention of audiences attracted by journalistic content to advertising companies, which in return seek to attract consumers to their products and brands. Beyond distributing both simultaneously, advertising and journalism can intermingle, which causes ethical concerns. From a normative point of view, news and advertisements should be separated clearly in regard to the production process and the content itself. The separation of “church and state” or the “Chinese Wall” between the newsroom and the business side within a media company are commonly used metaphors used to express the ideal of separation. This principle aims to protect journalistic autonomy from economic influences such as advertising considerations. Nevertheless, advertising interests may influence journalism in different forms and to various degrees. They are regularly discussed as influence on journalistic selection of topics as well as writing style, and as the source of attempts to blend advertising and editorial content. Scholarly concerns are increasingly consumer oriented and less critical journalism, biased reporting on advertisers’ brands or products, and the potential deception of audiences, for example, when hybrid forms of advertising such as native ads camouflage their commercial nature. The relationship between journalism and advertising has been treated as an orphan compared to the relationship to public relations or politics. However, the media organizations’ struggles for sustainable business models in the 21st century fuel discussions in media economics and journalism studies about whether advertising is a blessing or curse to journalism. In a nutshell, the relationship between advertising and journalism is as long-standing as it is ambivalent (see “Evolution of the Relationship”). On the one hand, advertising revenue largely lays the financial foundation for prospering professional journalism (see “Funding Journalism”). On the other hand, this financial dependency causes potential threats to journalistic autonomy (see “Influencing Journalism”).

A threat to journalism? How journalists and advertising sales managers in news organizations perceive and cope with native advertising

“…Traditionally, news organizations' business built on distributing journalistic content and the sales of advertising space (Picard, 2011). Online, these revenue streams are not profitable enough to make news production financially viable (Kleis Nielsen, 2016;Lauerer, 2019). Especially those news organizations located in the private sector therefore had to realign their business models.…”

The Visual Boundaries of Journalism: Native Advertising and the Convergence of Editorial and Commercial Content

“…The history of news media cannot be understood without the long-standing role of advertising as one of the main sources of revenue for news organizations (see Lauerer 2019). Native advertising is part of a broader phenomenon of increasing integration of the editorial and commercial sides within news media organizations (Cornia, Sehl, and Nielsen 2020) and has recently been implemented even by news organizations that used to criticize its use (Ferrer-Conill 2016;Wojdynski 2019).…”

In Service of News Subscribers: Exploring Belgian Journalists’ Perceptions of Stakeholder Relations in the Digital News Ecosystem

“…Internally, news media are struggling with the increasing tensions between their editorial and commercial sides. The traditional setup at news media to protect the newsroom from these tensions was a clear separation between the commercial and editorial sides of news media, represented by the metaphorical concepts of a "wall" or the "separation of Church and State" (Coddington 2015;Lauerer 2019). However, a long tradition of scholarly work has pointed out the fallibility of such a divide (Artemas et al 2018;Coddington et al 2018;Lewis et al 2008).…”

“…However, unlike other companies, news media are typically characterized by their pursuit of both democratic and financial goals. To avoid that the interests of advertisers (commercial) would collide with those of readers (democratic), commercial news media have traditionally separated their advertising departments from the newsroom (Lauerer 2019). This model has been predominant and stable in the news industry in the 20th century and has kept the news business a solid industry while at the same time providing independent journalism at an affordable price (Picard 2014).…”