Time magazine co-founder Henry Luce considered news publications that relied on ad revenue as “morally abhorrent”. If a publication was dependent on advertisers to survive, it could not cover news, independent of its advertisers.

As people move their attention online, fewer and fewer people are paying for newspapers and news magazines and more and more news publications are relying on ads for their revenue.

Can ad supported news sites cover news as effectively and independently as traditional news sources – or is the future of news doomed to be “morally abhorrent?