Media have been taking themselves seriously as brands at least since the debut of satellite TV, when people stopped watching television and began watching channels - notably CNN and MTV. The rise of the internet forced newspapers and magazines to do the same.
Experts say that good branding requires consistency: a strong identity and established values your audience can believe in. Newspapers and magazines are struggling with this, because quite often their online identity is totally different from that of their print product.
Take the Daily Mail for example. The British newspaper is pretty much the same one my parents read when I was a kid: lower middle-class, vaguely conservative, in love with the Royal Family, gossipy yet safe. But the Mail Online - the world's most popular online news site, with 190 million unique visitors a month - is a trashy tabloid beast, fuelled by the Kardashians, bizarre crimes and the famous "sidebar of shame", an orgy of celebrities in bikinis.
At some news organisations - even here in France - this kind of brand schizophrenia can lead to tension between online and print journalists. The irony is that most readers don't care. They are, as The New York Observer put it recently, brand agnostic. They've probably landed on the homepage from elsewhere on the internet. And then they stay for the sidebar of shame, hypnotised by gossip.
