When News and Ads Mix
A couple of years back, my dad had commented about the tendency of the news media to “be irresponsible, sensation-mongers, emotion-whippers, a gang that succumbs to the rot of commercialization”. Of course, things have just gotten worse since then. Many ads look exactly like content: there's even a term for it, the advertorial. There's nothing new about this (magazines have had such sections for ages), but now it's becoming hard to tell the difference between an ad and content since even the font, layout and background looks like regular content. Check out this Economic Times advertorial from 2 years back to see what I mean: Hard to say which is the advertorial in the pic above, right? (It's the one titled “Move Towards ‘CoreFirst’ Competence”). And the digital world just followed that trend. Last week, the New York Times unveiled its new website design with some articles labeled as “paid post” and a blue line for demarcation. But Emily Bell worries :