But besides that, advertisers having no direct decision-making powers in news publishing doesn't mean journalism doesn't get corrupted by it. From the POV of the publisher, advertising can be seen as a magic button that makes them a little bit of money each time a visitor presses it. Having it as the main profit source, their primary driver now becomes ensuring as many visitors as possible press this button as frequently as possible. That's how we arrive at reputable publications serving clickbait, writing outrage-inducing noninformative articles, and embedding chumboxes in their articles. That's how the "invented pyramid" - the golden standard of news publishing that nobody cares about anymore - became dead and buried.
What you're describing isn't a new phenomenon: newspaper ads have been around forever, and getting more people to read your newspaper or click on your articles has always increased profit. That's why most reputable newspapers, when they get large enough, build strong firewalls between the business and editorial sides of the company such that publishers cannot exert pressure over their editorial team even if they were short-sighted enough to try.
What did you find? I assumed the term meant something like a sponsored-content advertorial, but after actually Googling it, it looks like the term isn't a common one. All I get are hits about Grand Theft Auto V and Peter Madsen.
It seems like the term stems from this article (http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html). If that's correct, I'm inclined to agree that it's just shoddy journalism, and the better publications don't let it through:
> Different publications vary greatly in their reliance on PR firms. At the bottom of the heap are the trade press, who make most of their money from advertising and would give the magazines away for free if advertisers would let them. [2] The average trade publication is a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it look like a magazine. They're so desperate for "content" that some will print your press releases almost verbatim, if you take the trouble to write them to read like articles.
> At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Their reporters do go out and find their own stories, at least some of the time. They'll listen to PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. We managed to get press hits in almost every publication we wanted, but we never managed to crack the print edition of the Times. [3]
> [3] Different sections of the Times vary so much in their standards that they're practically different papers. Whoever fed the style section reporter this story about suits coming back would have been sent packing by the regular news reporters.
One of the anecdotes later in the article really emphasizes to me how public relations is literally propaganda with a PR makeover:
> Our greatest PR coup was a two-part one. We estimated, based on some fairly informal math, that there were about 5000 stores on the Web. We got one paper to print this number, which seemed neutral enough. But once this "fact" was out there in print, we could quote it to other publications, and claim that with 1000 users we had 20% of the online store market.
It the mechanics sound similar to the Soviet propaganda/disinformation campaign that pushed the idea that the US military created AIDS/HIV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo.
I'd say a vast majority of people agree, and are willing to pay a premium to support journalists AND not see advertisements. Unfortunately that's not an option.
And, no, I don't mind them. I'm very anti-ad, but financing and having access to functional journalism is more important than avoiding ads.