Advertising

Advertising has always had a complicated relationship with journalism. Traditionally, advertising is defined as a paid message that is typically persuasive in nature from an identified sponsor and placed in various media such as newspapers, television, or online. This has also included activities such as product placement where a brand is integrated into broadcast news programming or more recently as advertising designed to match an online publication’s editorial content but used to promote a brand. This entry first discusses the move toward relying on advertising to fund news media in the United States and the evolution of covert advertising techniques. It then looks at how audiences receive these techniques and efforts to regulate them, including industry self-regulation.