The media industry is suffering, with many companies laying off journalists at an alarming rate or shutting their doors altogether. One of the reasons for this financial downfall is declining advertising revenues, and Ad Fontes Media is committed to reversing this trend.

Our data is now available in The Trade Desk, one of the most powerful advertising technology platforms. With this integration, advertisers can now click in real time to buy the news sources and articles that score at the top of the Media Bias Chart, which are considered to be the most reliable, and/or click to exclude the ones at the bottom.

Lou Paskalis, chief strategy officer for Ad Fontes Media, says it’s now easy for advertisers to support high-quality journalism by funneling their ad dollars there.

“In a 15-year period ending in March of 2020 … we witnessed an 80 percent decline in advertiser investments in news, which has resulted, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in a 50 percent decline in the number of people working in newsrooms in roughly the same period,” he said.

“I don’t know that there will ever be a time that there’s more at stake for journalism than right now,” said Jeff Green, founder and CEO of The Trade Desk at the company’s Forward ’24 event on Tuesday. “If you read the number of headlines of them going out of business, we do not have a ton of time.”

Green said it’s important that The Trade Desk gather metadata on media and make it easier for advertisers to make “deliberate decisions about journalism.”

“As global citizens we should be concerned about the state of journalism,” he said. “It is critical to running democracies around the world.”

Paskalis noted that journalism is the only profession called out in the Constitution of the United States “because of its unique role in keeping our government accountable to the people.”

But over time, companies have pulled their advertising from news media in the name of brand safety and suitability.

“Marketers are increasingly avoiding the news in fear of getting caught up in culture wars,” Paskalis said recently on the Marketecture podcast with host Ari Paparo, because they’re afraid that their ad will appear with a polarizing piece of news content. “But there’s very little evidence of that ever happening coming from high-quality news.”

Paskalis said through The Trade Desk, advertisers now can choose to display their ads online next to high-quality news as it breaks. Ad Fontes Media’s human-plus-AI rating model analyzes more than 100,000 articles a day in near real time.

Advertising in news isn’t only good for journalism and democracy, it’s also smart for advertisers, Paskalis said. Our research shows that news is in the highest ROI (return-on-investment) category. In other words, core news readers are likely to spend money on the products that companies are advertising.

“What we know is news performs well, and then there’s this paranoia about advertising in news which is causing advertisers to walk away from it,” Paskalis said. “We’re trying to close that gap and get advertisers back in news.”

Learn more about the partnership between The Trade Desk and Ad Fontes Media in this article in Semafor, or read the press release on our website.

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Beth Heldebrandt is a Media Research Specialist at Ad Fontes Media. She has more than 30 years of experience in the fields of journalism and public relations, and was an adjunct instructor of journalism for 17 years at Eastern Illinois University. Beth has a B.A. in journalism from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and an M.A. in English from Eastern Illinois University. She’s a mom and grandma, and enjoys traveling, puzzles and reading.