Stepping on a Slippery Slope

[Commentary] My son Nick, a podcast aficionado, suggested recently that I’d enjoy a podcast called “StartUp,” which tells stories of companies that are just starting out. In its first season, the show’s host, Alex Blumberg, and his new business partner, Matt Lieber, train their microphones on their own company, Gimlet Media, which Blumberg, who is also the chief executive, hopes to turn into a podcast juggernaut. The second season, in which Blumberg is joined by a co-host, Lisa Chow, chronicles the highs and lows of a new dating app. Nick was right. Blumberg, a co-creator of NPR’s “Planet Money,” and Chow, formerly of NPR and WNYC, prove to be first-rate storytellers, hardly a surprise given their backgrounds. What was a surprise were the commercials spliced into each episode.

“StartUp’s” second season was sponsored by Ford Motor Company, the e-mail marketer MailChimp, and Personal Capital, a financial firm. But instead of running a traditional ad, the co-hosts crafted little stories, often conducting on-air interviews with a company official. As the Internet has eviscerated journalism’s traditional business model, news organizations have had to find new ways to generate revenue. The long sacrosanct barrier between the business side and the news side is falling. Many companies with the highest journalistic standards are adopting so-called native advertising techniques, which are meant to mimic the feel of the publication itself. (The New York Times’s native ads, called Paid Posts, do not mimic the paper.) I can’t help it: It does have the feel of a slippery slope. “The logical next step,” said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, “will be to set up an in-house studio that will produce ads for advertisers. And maybe ask the journalists to write the copy. I think the line is sliding.” Gimlet’s honorable intentions notwithstanding, I think he’s right.