The trip was advertised on a student group website as an educative “week of sight seeing, meeting with ministers, [and] government officials,” The New York Times reported, but the students ran the risk of arrest and incarceration were the filming discovered.

“For us, this is a matter of student welfare — students were lied to, they weren’t able to give their consent,” Alex Peters-Day, general secretary of the LSE’s student union, told the BBC. She added: “They’ve used students essentially as a human shield in this situation.”

Students knew they would be accompanied by a journalist, but they were not aware that investigative reporter John Sweeney, his wife and a cameraman had orchestrated the trip to film a documentary, LSE Director Craig Calhoun wrote. Sweeney, who graduated from the LSE in 1980, allowed North Korean guides to call him “professor,” according to The New York Times.

Eventually all publishers “will have no choice” but to try sponsored content, considering plummeting ad sales, paidContent noted. Newspaper advertising revenues fell over 9 percent in 2011, according to statistics from Newspaper Association of America. And, as Derek Thompson of The Atlantic wrote, “the vast majority of quality journalism has always relied, and probably will always rely, on advertising to be both high-quality and affordable to a massive audience.”

So from that perspective it’s good news that BrandConnect seems to have drawn on the merits and mistakes from other pioneers in advertorials such as BuzzFeed and The Atlantic, and hopefully the new system, too, will provide feedback that will help publishers create their own best practice models.

Maintaining high ethical standards and high quality journalism is therefore ever more of a challenge, but it is as essential as ever that news organisations embrace this. “For journalism to stay relevant in the future, ethics has to be at the centre,” said Amadou Mahta Ba, CEO of the African Media Initiative.

Added Larry Kilman, Deputy CEO of WAN-IFRA, “The expectation of credibility is part of the DNA of traditional media.”

High ethical standards need to run through the entire news organisation, not just the journalists on the ground. “If you have corrupt relations at a management level, the whole media structure becomes corroded,” said White, pointing to the phone-hacking scandal in the UK which led to the closure of The News of the World and prompted the Leveson Inquiry. The problem here, he stressed, wasn’t just unethical practices by individual reporters, but was rooted in the behaviour of those at the top.

Mahta Ba echoed the idea that we need “ethics at the highest echelons of media,” pointing out that journalists usually have a code of ethics and conduct, but CEOs don’t have any kind of ethical framework through which they work. “Fish start rotting from the head,” he added.

Liberal media watchdog Media Matters announced yesterday that The Wall Street Journal had, “following criticism of its disclosure practices,” revealed the political affiliations one of its op-ed writers.

Max Boot is one of ten contributors to the Journal’s opinion pages whose views the newspaper has published without mentioning the writers' links to presidential candidate Mitt Romney, according to Media Matters.

“In a total of 23 pieces, the op-ed writers attacked President Obama or praised Romney without the paper acknowledging their Romney connections,” the organization asserted in a September 27 report.

“Op-ed writers aren’t supposed to be objective or to have no stake in the subjects they’re writing about,” Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Nicholas Goldberg is quoted as saying. “But when a writer does have a particular relationship to his subject that is not immediately apparent to the reader, it is important to disclose that so the reader can evaluate the argument intelligently.”

On September 28, below a book review by Boot (published in the print edition on September 29), the Journal included the following bio line: “Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an advisor to the Romney campaign.”