Susan Patton’s ur-Jewish Mother letter to the editor, published last week in the Daily Princetonian, in which she tells female students that “By the time you are a senior, you basically have only the men in your own class to choose from, and frankly, they now have four classes of women to choose from. Maybe you should have been a little nicer to these guys when you were freshmen?” has had its awful gender politics dissected to death, significantly by Maureen O’Connor at the Cut. But one thing I’ve been struck by is how little discussion there has been of the decision to publish this particular letter by the Daily Princetonian staff. It’s true that alumni with all sorts of nutty opinions write into their former college papers all the time, with all sorts of advice to offer the students who came after them. But Patton’s letter seems to exist at the crux of a number of trends that are a reality in publishing outside of the Ivory Tower.

The Daily Princetonian seems to be crashed by traffic to the site, so I can’t check to see if they serve ads on the site. But assuming that, like their competitors at the Yale Daily News and the Harvard Crimson, they do, the decision to publish Patton’s letter was a demonstration that college newspapers aren’t just a place to learn the basics of reporting and opinion writing: they’re glomming on to the business realities of online publishing as well. Patton’s letter is exactly the kind of thing that is tremendously clicky, to the extent that it was probably worth it financially to the Daily Princetonian to publish it even if the site ended up offline because of the massive influx of readers. And it seems to have been worth it because of that traffic even though Patton’s letter was likely to embarrass her son, who is an existing undergraduate, and wasn’t presented as part of some sort of larger debate, but rather published on its own. Its value as perspective on the Princeton experience, or even on larger work-life balance issues, is extraordinarily minimal. But the letter does represent a particular kind of trolling of young women about their career and family choices that’s done extraordinarily well online, both in terms of the traffic to the primary stories themselves, and in creating a secondary market to discuss and dissect those stories. And while some criticism has tended to focus on publications that rely heavily on these stories, as The Atlantic has in recent years, in this case, the blowback was aimed squarely at Patton, rather than the Daily Princetonian itself.

All in all, it’s a very successful, cynical execution of a well-established strategy. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with students coming out of college newspapers—particularly those who want to get into the journalism business for real—knowing what it takes to be successful in the news business. But it does depress me a little bit to see those realities trickle down to publications that have the enormous luxury of being supported by alumni endowments. Why not take advantage of the one time you’ll likely be free of traffic and metrics pressure and just put out the best college paper you can?

Working in the digital marketing industry has given me a sort of backstage pass to the 24-hour-a-day variety show that is online advertising. As the Internet displaces print, television and other traditional media outlets, businesses and marketing strategists are doing whatever they can to attract and keep ad dollars coming in. While some businesses manage to keep up with the ever-shifting online advertising landscape, others need more time and resources to get their act together.

And although the majority of digital marketing firms, online publications and large brands carefully craft creative and effective campaigns, digital marketing is still a relatively young industry — so it’s pretty much inevitable that some campaigns will hit a wrong note or bomb altogether. It looks like The Atlantic learned that the hard way this week with sponsored content from the Church of Scientology; after less than 12 hours on The Atlantic‘s website, the effusive and disturbingly salesy piece was taken down and an apology was tendered to readers.

Like most mainstream online publications, The Atlantic runs sponsored content on their sites to generate revenue. Choosing and publishing sponsored content is always a balancing act between the right content and the right target audience; and a digital marketing campaign that entices click-through with genuinely interesting and useful content is usually more successful than interruption marketing tactics like pop-ups or splash page videos. This kind of permission-based advertising is working out well; according to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 55 percent of business-to-consumer marketers plan to increase their content marketing spend in 2013.

But the failure of sponsored content tends to reflect a misreading of a publication’s audience, which is demonstrated by the near-instant backlash heaped onto The Atlantic from all corners of the social media chattersphere, including several Atlantic staffers. There’s also a real discussion to be had about the ethics of sponsored content that masquerades as journalism. But just like the commercials that air between segments of your favorite TV show or the previews shown before a movie in a theater, consumers have the choice to skip or ignore them. And Internet users must accept that if publications provide their audiences with free content, advertising must be a part of the equation.

Whether an online publication is a startup or a venerable magazine, investing time and money into targeting its audience is imperative. Trading readers for ad dollars rarely ends well—and although The Atlantic is sure to weather this storm, other publications that make the same mistakes could end up committing social media suicide.

My sense is that the reason so many people are so shocked and upset about the layoffs that claimed Jack Shafer, Tim Noah, Juliet Lapidos, and June Thomas’ jobs at Slate yesterday is not just that those journalists are beloved (and while I don’t agree with everything Lapidos wrote, I think her writing on friendships between men and women is significant and shouldn’t be forgotten). But I wonder if some of the shock comes from the fact that Noah and Shafer in particular were institutions, independent of Slate, and so the idea that Slate can fire them feels like a shock. There’s this idea in the age of new media that if you write a column or a blog under your own name, or if your brand is honed to a particular fineness, that you can never really be fired, you can just take your brand and your product somewhere else with you. It’s easy to think of Andrew Sullivan getting fired as a magazine editor, because it happened. It’s nigh-impossible to imagine someone firing Andrew and the apparatus he’d built up around him. I hope and believe that Shafer, Noah, Lapidos, and Thomas will end up fine, but their firings are significant not just for who they are, but for how it makes people feel about the power of brand and reputation in the age of Internet journalism.