Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future.

I'm Shannon Paulus.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to If Then. We're coming to you from Slate and FutureTons,

a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New America.

We are recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 16th. On today's show, we'll talk about how

some news outlets, including Slate, create an extra stream of revenue by including Amazon links

in their articles. Since we're in the midst of Amazon Prime Day, which is poorly named because it is now two days,

we thought we'd talk about the ethical questions that come up when journalists rely on this symbiosis with Amazon.

For an extra level of insight, I'll talk to Jackie Chang, former editor-in-chief of Wirecutter,

and current editor-in-chief of music at WQXR.

After the interview, my colleague Aaron Mack will join me for Don't Close My Tabs,

where we'll talk about the best things we saw on the web this week.

That's all coming up on if-then.

So, now we're going to talk about Amazon Prime Day, or Prime Days, as it's today and yesterday.

There's some scope creep happening here with this made-up holiday.

For the uninitiated, Amazon is deep discounting a lot of goods.

Other places are having copycat sales, and many, many news outlets, including Slate, are devoting at least some coverage on what to buy.

And they're doing it because of affiliate links.

When you buy something that they recommend, they get a little bit of the purchase price.

It's not a kickback per se, because that implies that something nefarious is going on.

But as with any source of revenue from journalism, the ethics can be tricky.

To think about how consumers and journalists should navigate all this, I'll be catching up with

...