Once upon a time, running a newspaper was a fairly simple proposition.

I'm not talking about those golden days before the Web destroyed newspapers’ carefully crafted business model, although in retrospect, those decades of double-digit profit margins and a near monopoly of news in local markets do seem pretty sweet.

No, I'm talking about a period that began in the U.S. in colonial times and ended in the early decades of the 19th century.  It was a time when newspapers were essentially house organs of political parties or commercial interests, when editors and publishers knew which side their bread was buttered on, and there was no need to spend a lot of time agonizing over what stories needed to be covered and how and where they would appear in the paper.

But by mid-century, that was beginning to change.  It turned out that there was more money to be made selling advertising than by accepting subsidies from commercial and political sponsors.  In 1870, only 13% of daily newspapers in the 50 biggest U.S. cities identified themselves as “independent.”  By 1900, 47% of them did.  By then, advertising revenue made up 55% of total newspaper revenue.

And so publishers and editors had to learn how to deal with a new challenge; how to keep advertisers happy while still maintaining a degree of editorial independence.

Advertisers, on the other hand, were only too happy to sow confusion.  They were not averse to blurring the lines between “news” and advertising.  The typical North American newspaper at the turn of the century would frequently feature three types of content on the page: news, advertising, and a hybrid that was essentially advertising disguised to look like news.

For a little extra money, just about any advertisement could be re-written and placed in the newspaper disguised as a news story, with nothing that would allow the reader to distinguish between material that had been paid for by the advertiser, and that which was generated by the newspapers’ own reporters.

Newspapers were often contractually obliged to engage in this kind of deception. Those dealing with the Jennings Advertising Agency, for example, were required to agree to “reprint on news or editorial pages of said newspaper, such notices set in the body type of said paper and bearing no mark to indicate advertising, as are furnished from time to time by said Jennings Agency.”

These kinds of arrangements were welcomed by publishers, who were only too happy to oblige a prospective advertiser, but they were loathed by most editors and reporters.  By the 1920’s, as journalism began to develop codes of ethics, asserting the separation of advertising from editorial was high on the list of priorities, and has remained so ever since.

The wall between “church and state” was not to be breached, though it was always far more porous than many journalists cared to admit.  From the start, there has been a strong whiff of mythology about the separation between the business office and the newsroom, but rhetorically at least, the idea that editorial decisions would be made independent of the wishes of advertisers has long been considered to be one of journalism’s most fundamental principles.