In The New York Times' In New Jersey, Only a Few Media Watchdogs Are Left, David Chen writes, "The Star-Ledger, which almost halved its newsroom eight years ago, has mutated into a digital media company requiring most reporters to reach an ever-increasing quota of page views as part of their compensation."

That quota is to attract adtech placements.

Adtech is called advertising and looks like advertising, but it's a different breed. That breed is direct marketing, a cousin of spam descended from what we still call junk mail.

Like junk mail, adtech is driven by data, intrusively personal, looking for success in tiny-percentage responses, and oblivious to massive negative externalities, such as wanton and unwelcome surveillance, annoying the shit out of people and filling the world with crap.

Here's one way to tell the difference between real advertising and adtech:

• Real advertising wants to be in a publication because it values the publication's journalism and readership.
• Adtech wants to push ads at readers anywhere it can find them.

In the old advertising-supported publishing world, journalism was what mattered most. In the new adtech-supported publishing world, content is what matters most.

Real advertisers in the old publishing world were flattered to be in the Star-Ledger. Adtech-oriented advertisers in the new publishing world just want to "go digital," whatever it takes. And there are lots of intermediaries to help with that.

As I wrote in Separating Advertising's Wheat and Chaff, it is because of that orientation and those intermediaries that "Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself."

That's also why, to operate in publishing's new alien-built economy, journalists need to meet that "ever-increasing quota of page views." Better to produce content than to do the best work they can.

Problem is, adtech doesn't care about journalism at all, because its economy is structured to maximize the sum of content in the world, regardless of how good it is, or where it comes from.

Think about it:

• Would we have fake news without adtech?
• Would we have today's increasingly hostile divisions between blue and red, black and white?

Want to save journalism and the democracies that depend on it? Re-brain Madison Avenue and the CMOs that are still drunk on digital. Bring back real advertising.

To help with that, go back and read Don Marti's Targeting failure: legit sites lose, intermediaries win.