According to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post’s crossword puzzle has been blacklisted as being too offensive for advertisers, along with a benign, but purply written article about thunderstorms, and a ranking of boxed brownie mixes.

Marketers have long been wary about running ads in the news media, because they are worried their adverts will appear next to news stories that are off their message such as terrorism, plane crashes or polarising political stories.  But automatic software tools are making that advertising no-go zone wider.

Forty percent of the Washington Post's material is deemed "unsafe" at any given time, said Johanna Mayer-Jones, the paper's chief advertising officer, referencing a study the company did about a year ago. "The revenue implications of that are significant."

The Washington Post's crossword page was blocked by advertisers' technology seven times during a weekslong period in October because it was labelled as politics, news and natural disaster-related material.

The tech company responsible for the software has said it will write a bit of code around the problem, but still this is weird.

The thunderstorm story was cut off from ad revenue when a sentence about "flashing and pealing volleys from the artillery of the atmosphere" triggered a warning that it was too much like an "arms and ammunition" story.  While this sort of self-indulgent writing should be purged from news stories, it was no reason to lose all its advertising.

As for the brownies, a reference to research from "grocery, drug, mass-market" and other retailers was automatically flagged by advertisers for containing the word "drug."

While some brands avoid news entirely, many take what they consider to be a more surgical approach. They create lengthy blacklists of words or websites that the company considers off-limits and employ ad technology to avoid such terms.

Blacklists have become extremely detailed, serving as a de facto news-blocking tool, publishers said.

The lists are used in automated ad buying. Brands aim their ads not at specific websites, but at online audiences with certain characteristics — people with shopping or web-browsing histories, for example.

A recent blacklist from Microsoft included about 2,000 words including "collapse," according to the Wall Street Journal.

The danger is that newspapers are in trouble as it is. Local journalism has vanished and the big dailies are closing.  Without advertising, they will shut.