Digital Commons Network^™

What Am I Reading?: Article-Style Native Advertisements In Canadian Newspapers, Victoria Rubin, Sarah Cornwell

FIMS Presentations

Native ads are ubiquitous in the North American digital news context. Their form, content and presentational style are practically indistinguishable from regular news editorials, and thus are often mistaken for informative content by newsreaders. This advertising practice is deceptive, in that it exploits loopholes in human digital literacy. Despite this, it is flourishing as a lucrative digital news advertising format. This paper documents and compares the 2018 Canadian news editorial writing and advertising practices in an effort to highlight their similarities and differences for potential automatic detection and categorization. We collected 10 native ads and 10 editorial pieces from 4 …