MMMM #57 - News vs Promo & No disclosure?

For years I've harped on the blurring, then the erasing, of the line between news and promotions. Usually it's been broadcasting where it became somewhat more difficult to determine if a story or interview was a sales piece or a journalistic effort, but now another newspaper has ventured across the boundary in a small but significant way. The Montgomery Advertiser list of "News" stories on Saturday included this item right after Liquor License Approved and right before Attorney General Reviewing Nationwide Plan: Five reasons to buy the Sunday Montgomery Advertiser. Four of the five reasons listed are stories scheduled for publication, one is the note that there will be $200 worth of coupons in the paper. I don't suppose the recent AP story about coupon clipping being replaced by coupon gathering (online) made it into that section. I know this is being picky, but does the "Reasons to buy" item belong in the list of stories? Ah well. Look at wrappers some papers have started using that look like the paper's front page but are really ads. And the full-page ads with the tiny word "advertisement" up top have been around for many years. Maybe that train has left the station? Meanwhile on Sunday, The NY Daily News published a story based on their reporters going to some of those town-hall meetings on health-insurance reform in which they spoke with people attending in Florida without identifying themselves as reporters. Under what circumstances is it OK for a reporter to lie by omission like that? I don't make these points with any particular relish. I hate what is happening to print. Friends are losing their life's work, and, as is brilliantly explored in the book Losing The News , when the last papers go under, where will bloggers and broadcasters get their material? [ADDENDUM: Stars and Stripes reports the end of the contract between the Pentagon and a company that examined the politics of the reporters wanting to be attached to military units, ranking them by their positive stories.] [The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of this blog.]