Groundwork for success is being well laid, based on a lot of painfully bought experience from the last decade. I have no doubt that the needs of local businesses, stores and services alike, will grow. There are few businesses that will be able to prosper without some kind of digital strategy. If newspaper companies can really change their stripes — getting away from selling print and digital space — and really put merchants' results at the forefront of this new business, they've got a real shot at success. That's why most are hiring new, separate sales staffs; execution and changing at least part of company culture will decide marketing services' fate.

Incumbent players in a particular industry routinely fail to make the necessary changes to the way they do things, even when they can see the disruption occurring all around them. In almost every case, they see the disruptors as not worthy of their attention because they are operating at the low end of the market, and either don’t see that as important or are too committed to their existing business models ... The key to managing that disruption, Christensen says, is to find those other value-added businesses or markets or functions -- "jobs to be done," as he calls them -- that news or journalism consumers are looking for.

They are getting farther away from the hyperlocal vision and really pushing generic SEO content to try and get unique visitors. But I can't see why people are going to click on their local Patch to get info about the Oscars or parenting advice. You can get that anywhere.

You ask if we have a policy. There is no policy for this, or for anything, really. The whole point of the company is that we trust our reporters to be smart and judicious without having to adopt the ethical pretense that what they're doing is anything but a sort of professionalized rudeness. I'll get killed for this, but: Journalism ethics is nothing more than a measure of the scurrilousness your brand will bear. That's it. Ethics has nothing to do with the truth of things, only with the proper etiquette for obtaining it, so as to piss off the fewest number of people possible. That works fine for a lot of news outlets; we don't have to worry about niceties.

As a political reporter for GQ, I've been jokingly asked whether I ever posed for the magazine and loudly called a porn star by a senior think-tank fellow at his institute's annual gala. In my prior job as a Hill reporter, one of my best source relationships with a member of Congress ended after I remarked that I looked like a witch who might hop on a broom in my new press-badge photo and he replied that I looked like I was "going to hop on something."

Of course, nagging is an integral part to pay-meters' success. They wear you down. If your experience online is anything like mine, I tend to ignore the pay-us boxes until they finally get too annoying. At some point, if what I'm reading is worth it, I say to myself: "Screw it. Just get this over with."

With the right staffing and approach, It's hard to see where agencies outflank publishers. Publishers know how to engage people online and already have an audience ready and waiting. They're also able to experiment in ways that agencies can't; just look at Gawker's vision for a branded discussion platform. There's a power shift brewing; don't be surprised when publishers start to take over the marketing world.