ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses how the native advertising discourse manifests in reality. The novelty of native advertising is that it advocates for openly merging commercial and editorial content, aggravating an existing tension between the professional and commercial logics of journalism. While there are several accounts of permeability where political and commercial actors influenced editorial content, journalistic autonomy remained relatively unproblematized during the second half of the twentieth century. The proponents of native advertising argue that forms of revenue carry no drawbacks as long as readers understand they are reading commercial content; to advertisers, native is attractive because it mimics editorial content in such a way that readers barely identify it as commercial content, hence appropriating journalistic clout. If the public believes journalistic independence is sustained, then the legitimacy of the democratic values of journalism remains intact, as does the publisher's reputation. Native ads camouflaged as news transfer some of the newspapers' reputation to the advertiser, for good or ill.
