Native advertising, which is so-called for being designed to look like news, first began to surface in the United States about a decade ago on websites like Vice and Buzzfeed. It was so lucrative that soon even newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times were offering native ads. Jill Abramson called it “the industry’s new digital Frankenstein” in her memoir.
  • grte@lemmy.caOP
    6·
    8 months ago

    Postmedia now sells not just native ads but even news coverage and space on its opinion pages for those willing to pay, as a Canadaland investigation revealed in 2020. Its business model, as my recent book The Postmedia Effect shows, is simply to rake in as much cash as possible from all available sources in order to keep sending tens of millions of dollars a year in payments on its massive debt south to its US hedge fund owners/bondholders.

    Lay off your journalists and sell preferential coverage to whichever organizations need to sanitize their message seems to be Postmedia’s current business model. It’s a lot cheaper when the stories come to you, I suppose.