This Headline Is Not for Sale

When it comes to walling off a publication's news content from the influence of advertisers, I am a strict federalist. By that, I mean that I believe that the editorial and marketing departments should be completely walled off from each other and operate as independent entities, with separate staffs, missions and budgets. At stake is nothing less than a publication's integrity.

To people on the marketing side of the business, it may seem that if it were up to journalists, there wouldn't be any advertising. This is simply not true. Editors, reporters and even mouthy columnists like me accept that advertising pays our salaries, especially online, where only a handful of users pay for content. If it weren't for those irksome banner ads running down the sides of our articles, or the even more annoying pop-up ads that scream at you to click and find out more about some product you don't want, we'd all be working for free.

From a journalist's vantage point, however, it often appears that people on the business side care about one thing: money. They don't seem to understand that it's the content that attracts readers in the first place. Otherwise advertisers wouldn't bother renting space to hawk their products and services. If readers begin to feel that news coverage can be bought and sold, we lose our credibility and they'll surf elsewhere. Then we'd all be out of jobs.

Of course, that doesn't mean I don't have compassion for my comrades on the business side, especially at sites that are not charter members of the Big E-Four: AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, which together skimmed half of all online advertising dollars in 2003, and accounted for 38 percent of all online usage minutes in May 2004, according to Jupiter Research analyst Nate Elliott.

This year, Elliott estimates that online ad spending in the United States will hit $8.4 billion, most of it "banners and skyscrapers, rich and streaming media, floating ads, interstitials and other graphics." Regardless of the format, he says, smaller publishers will be forced to "scramble for ad dollars." And dot-com media face another serious threat: non-news sites like craigslist and eBay, which can live off much lower margins and don't have to plow money and resources into creating fresh content. So the temptation by marketing departments to squeeze as many dollars as possible from advertising will only intensify, which could affect the editorial side of the equation.

Rising from this volatile mix of competing interests is a product called IntelliTxt by Vibrant Media. It works by underlining certain words in an article so that when a reader runs his cursor over one of them, an ad springs up. For example, in a story on antivirus software, words like "virus," "security" and "worms" might be highlighted. Then readers, if they so choose, could mouse over one or all of them, click on a "sponsored link" and go straight to the advertiser's website.

Depending on your point of reference, it's either like the ads in the right-hand column of a Google results page or the funny factoid bubbles in VH1's Pop-Up Video. (Click here for a demo.)

"It's incredibly targeted," says Vibrant co-founder Craig Gooding, who claims that readers click on IntelliTxt links 24 times as often as they do traditional banner ads. "People on the web want convenience. They want to do things as quickly as possible. To bring the concept of search into the publishing environment gives publishers access to more money, which makes a lot of sense."

Vibrant reports that 250 online publishers have signed up so far, including Popular Mechanics, TheAutoChannel.com, popular gaming site IGN and, most recently, Forbes.com. IntelliTxt isn't obtrusive like pop-up ads or even banners, its creators say, because readers are in control; they have the option of running their mouse over the words and clicking on the links. And Vibrant supplies the advertisers and splits the revenue that is generated with the publisher. In a sense, it's like found money.

It's not surprising that marketers love IntelliTxt while many journalists despise it. AlwaysOn columnist Rafe Needleman called IntelliTxt "pretty bad news" from an ethics standpoint "because it blurs the line between editorial content, which readers should expect to be free of commercial influence, and advertising, which we know is paid-for and biased."

In AdAge, Kelly McBride, a member of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute, compared the technology to "product placement," while Doug Feaver, editor of washingtonpost.com and president of the Online News Association, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he refuses to consider IntelliTxt because for a publication to maintain credibility the lines between ads and news must be "as clear and distinct as possible." When Vibrant Media pitched its product to Wired News, editors also gave it the thumbs down. A chief concern was that rational cynics might suspect that Wired News was loading its stories with keywords like "memory," "video games" and "impotent" just to make an extra buck.

It also didn't help that when IntelliTxt prepared a demo for Wired News -- in a story about a computer worm running rampant on the net -- the word "worm" linked to an ad for medicine to get rid of stomach worms.

Nevertheless, I think that IntelliTxt could work well for publications that have no pretense of objectivity or don't draw a strong distinction between advertising and editorial copy. It also makes sense that in an article or review of a product like, say, the iPod, viewers could click on a link and immediately be taken to a site to buy one. And that should translate into a thriving market for Vibrant, which projects revenue of about $25 million this year.

But news sites with reputations to protect have to answer to a higher authority: their readerships. That's why they should avoid IntelliTxt. Nowadays the wall between editorial and marketing must extend to the content itself. Marketers can have the sides, top and bottom of a page to peddle products and services, but the body must remain pure.