Church and state, journalistically speaking. Here's a new wrinkle in breaking down the boundary that should exist between news and advertising. Wired News covers this story.

It's not surprising that marketers love IntelliTxt while many journalists despise it. AlwaysOn columnist Rafe Needleman called IntelliTxt "pretty bad news" from an ethics standpoint "because it blurs the line between editorial content, which readers should expect to be free of commercial influence, and advertising, which we know is paid-for and biased." In AdAge, Kelly McBride, a member of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute, compared the technology to "product placement," while Doug Feaver, editor of washingtonpost.com and president of the Online News Association, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he refuses to consider IntelliTxt because for a publication to maintain credibility the lines between ads and news must be "as clear and distinct as possible." When Vibrant Media pitched its product to Wired News, editors also gave it the thumbs down. A chief concern was that rational cynics might suspect that Wired News was loading its stories with keywords like "memory," "video games" and "impotent" just to make an extra buck.