Poynter on the Record

Last month, FoxNews.com ran an article about Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert's postelection prospects. In the story, the words "house," "speaker" and "leadership" were underlined twice.

The underlines weren't for emphasis -- they were clues that those words were doubling as advertisements. When readers moved their cursors over the underlined words, a pop-up advertisement would appear, obscuring some of the text of the article. The ad above the word "speaker," for instance, was for the search engine Ask.com. "Search Ask.com for Speakers," it said, and linked readers to the site.

This type of online advertising within the text of an article, known as in-text advertising, has been around for a while. But it used to be relegated to niche sites like the videogamers' haven IGN.com and ScienceDaily.com. Now it is appearing on some mainstream journalistic Web sites, like those of News Corp's Fox News, Cox Enterprises Inc.'s Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Hearst Corp.'s Popular Mechanics magazine. That marks a departure from a long-observed tradition in the print medium of keeping editorial content separate from advertising.