&gt; I&#x27;m glad Forbes does have disclosures although I&#x27;m not sure how useful they are to casual readers to discern biases of one sort or another.<p>I agree with you that transparency is paramount. The FTC agrees with you and is regulating how this will work. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;tips-advice&#x2F;business-center&#x2F;guidance&#x2F;native-advertising-guide-businesses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;tips-advice&#x2F;business-center&#x2F;guidance&#x2F;nat...</a> I am not a huge proponent of &#x2F; believer in regulators like the FTC truly fixing the issue but do hope they&#x27;ll help achieve the shared goal. People have to demand it and publishers &#x2F; media orgs have to embrace it.<p>&gt; boil down to &quot;it&#x27;s just the way the world is.&quot;<p>That&#x27;s a fair encapsulation, though I&#x27;d add that it&#x27;s the way the world has <i>always</i> been. For millennia, artists and story tellers have bemoaned the next generation -- &quot;kids these days aren&#x27;t being thoughtful or correct; they&#x27;re being vulgar to appeal to the masses.&quot; This has been the case since before the Upanishads and Beowulf, since before jazz was called &quot;the devil&#x27;s music,&quot; since before anyone started selling newspapers or airtime on radio and TV. People deviating from the norm are frowned upon, then they become the norm and frown on the next generation. The progression occurs for artistic reasons -- &quot;this is the way we think and communicate now&quot; -- and commercial reasons -- &quot;this headline sells.&quot;<p>&gt; quite a variety of pubs both online and offline, which have managed not to embrace the dark side of modern publishing quite so enthusiastically.<p>This is also true. Publications like The Economist, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times have been incredibly wary of both the loss of editorial command and control that comes with allowing non-staff writers to regularly contribute stories and with selling advertorial products to advertisers. They are all getting into one or both areas to degrees.<p>Forbes, specifically, has been leading on both fronts and continues to push it. Those on the vanguard often have the most arrows sticking out of their chests. Some arrows are deserved; some are just from those in the norm bemoaning The Next Thing.