Many publications have long relied on outside contributors with various degrees of transparency and conflicts of interest. When blogging was the hotness, as an analyst, I contributed to CNET (unpaid; they paid some bloggers but I didn't want that conflict of interest). After CBS bought them and the whole blog climate changed (and I moved to a vendor), I stopped doing that. But a ton of that sort of thing went on in the tech trade press--some good and some almost certainly not so good.