Fox News is a case in point. On Friday, the day of the Newtown massacre, Fox published an ad for a novelty T-shirt that appeared like this:

Chicago lawyer Evan Brown noticed the ad late Friday afternoon. Appalled, Brown took a screenshot of the ad and published it here.

How did this happen?

Fox News did not respond to a request for comment, but the t-shirt company and advertising-industry people I spoke with provided enough information to piece together what happened. The unfortunate ad is not the result of Fox’s insensitivity or someone’s screw-up, but instead just reflects the reality of online advertising.

According to Mike Grouse of Bad Idea T-Shirts, the company has been running the bloody shirt ad for the last year. On Friday, it moved to take the ad down.”Yes, we removed the ads from Google upon becoming aware of the tragedy. We worked directly with our Google rep to expedite the process. We also blocked Fox News from receiving our ads,” he told us by email.

Google was involved in this case because it was the company that provided the back-end tools that let the t-shirt company buy the ads (other companies offer similar tools). In situations like this, Google works with both publishers and advertisers to help hit the kill switch on the technology that serves the ads.

“As soon as we recognized the sensitivity of the ad in this context, we stopped serving it,”  said a Google spokesperson by email.

Fox and the t-shirt company weren’t the only ones to publish ill-advised ads on the day of the Newtown killings. As Fast Company reported, Facebook ads on Friday invited people to try machine gun video games:

Do publishers have any control anymore?

While newspapers make ad blunders from time to time, their publishing process often means they are in the driver’s seat in deciding whether ads appear in their papers, and if they do, on which pages. The situation is far different for online publishers — even rich, powerful ones like Fox or Facebook — which serve millions of diverse ads in real time.

It’s just publishers that can be stung by this — big brands that buy through ad-bidding exchanges (and many do) and whose ads wind up near unflattering content could also be dinged reputationally.

All of this is a function of how the online ad industry has evolved. Publishers used to simply sell ad space ahead of time, usually at a given dollar amount for every thousand times an ad was seen. But as ad inventory grew, publishers began turning to third-party services that that helped them fill unsold spots with low cost ads. The benefit was extra money; the downside was a loss of control over what appears on their site.

Dealing with third-party ad suppliers can be tricky because you’re effectively opening a portal to a flood of unknown content. This appears to be what happened in the case of Fox. If Fox had sold the ad space directly, it would have been better prepared to stop the ads from appearing; but since, the bloody t-shirt ads were just some of the millions of third-party ads flowing onto its sites, Fox’s ability to react was limited.

Publishers do have some control, of course. They can rely on tags to screen out certain categories like politics or pornography. But in unlucky cases like this one, it took hours for the diverse parts of the ad operation — the advertiser, the ad broker and the publisher — to respond (but as one source noted, news sites like Fox publish sensitive stories all the time so Fox may need to tighten its controls).

The bottom line

Publishers will have an easier time responding to a Fox-like situation if they have pre-sold their ad inventory, according to people I talked with. Nonetheless, they do not have technology to be pro-active about ad-screening — there are too many ads and it’s impossible to foresee every type of mismatch. And, unlike a newspaper, publishers and ad staff do not have a time delay to review how an ad will appear.

With the spread of new ad tools that make it easier for brands to bid on ad space in real time, mishaps like this could become more common. According to IDC, real-time ads will amount to $2 billion and 20 percent of all display ads in 2012.

If there is bright spot for nervous advertisers, it’s that online publishing is transient, and it’s easy to scrub mistakes. Unlike ill-advised newspaper ads, ads like the bloody t-shirt one will simply vanish — unless, of course, someone captures them with a screenshot.

Now, as Beck prepares to leave Fox, he’s expanding his footprint in the book publishing world. His multimedia production company, Mercury Radio Arts, has signed an agreement with Simon & Schuster (NYSE: CBS) to launch a new imprint, Mercury Ink, which will publish books that “Glenn is passionate about across a variety of genres.” Beck’s experience driving book sales could potentially make this co-venture very profitable for both Simon & Schuster and himself.

Beck and Simon & Schuster also renewed their co-publishing agreement, and he will continue to write “numerous books” for S&S each year under its conservative imprint, Threshold Editions. His new novel, The Snow Angel, comes out in October.

The division will be run by Kevin Balfe, Mercury’s SVP, Publishing. The first title, Michael Vey: The Prisoner of Cell 25 by bestselling author and Mormon father of five Richard Paul Evans, is a young adult novel that will be published in August. In the press release announcing the joint venture, Beck says Mercury Ink “will work with the best authors in a variety of genres to craft books that am I passionate about and that I believe will strongly connect with my audience.” It is unclear whether all of the imprint’s books will be specifically geared toward Beck’s existing conservative fans or whether the imprint will attempt to target a more general audience; we’ll update the post when we know more. The imprint’s books will not all have a set political message; some will be geared toward a conservative audience and some will target a more general audience.

Now that Oprah has ended her talk show–and, at least for now, her book club–the book publishing industry is lacking a major figure who can drive audiences toward specific titles. Simon & Schuster may have found that in Beck, whom the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) called the “new Oprah” for thrillers in 2009. But with the launch of the new imprint, he will probably be less likely to promote books published by other houses.

While his show’s ratings have fallen over the past year, a recent New York magazine article reported that in 2010 he earned over 90 percent of his income from non-Fox related activities. His radio show, “The Glenn Beck Program,” is syndicated on over 400 stations and has 10 million weekly listeners. The Blaze, which launched last August, pulls in over three million visitors a month.

Despite Beck’s large and devoted audience, he is clearly a much more polarizing figure than Oprah. While many readers will be drawn to books that are associated with him–even if they do not contain overtly political content or a certain message–as many may be turned off for the same reason.

Those are the kinds of numbers that are leading FoxNews execs to make a bigger bet online video in general and on its live, eight-hour video webcast The Strategy Room. The online-only talkfest will get a major overhaul this July, with a particularly ad-friendly bent. The thought of offering a daylong webcast that’s otherwise similar to what’s offered on TV, as opposed to computer screens, has a number of media buyers I spoke to intrigued. But somewhat dubious about shifting a great deal of spending. I spoke to Jeremy Steinberg, VP, Digital Sales & Business Development for the cable news channel, about how he plans to convince advertisers that daytime online viewers are just as valuable as their TV watching counterparts. More after the jump

– Live, from 9-5: Among the coming changes, Strategy Room will be moving away from its pop-up video mode to an embedded style. Fox News is also working on dynamic ad insertions. But even though YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) and Hulu have been pushing more long form video, the live, 9AM to 5PM streaming newscast will still bear more resemblance to TV from an advertiser standpoint, Steinberg said. There will be three breaks per hour and the programs will not be like It

MySpace uReport isn’t as extensive as portals like iReport or NowPublic. MySpace members can only upload and tag photos and videos — not actual stories — and Fox retains editorial control of the home page. Currently, it’s pretty bare, sans thumbnails of Fox News personalities and links to their MySpace profile pages. (The name “uReport” is a nice play on the Fox News catchphrase “We Report.You Decide,” and, of course, it’s the opposite of CNN’s “iReport.”)

But by keeping a tighter grip on what gets posted as “news,” Fox avoids potential credibility or legal issues like the backlash CNN faced after the false story about Steve Jobs having a heart attack got picked up from iReport. If a MySpace member’s content is pertinent, it could wind up on air via Fox News Channel or on FoxNews.com; it will be interesting to see what kinds of clips and photos users think might be relevant to Fox, and even more interesting to see what percentage of them Fox in turn feeds to its audience. Release.

Photo Credit: lypp

As part of the deal, about 10 pieces of student-reported Palestra content a week will be running on both the Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network by the fall, and the focus would be on the presidential campaign. For Fox News, this may help attract younger viewers, or at the very least gives it content which gives the viewpoint of younger audiences on its networks.

Palestra, which was founded by Joe Weasel, a former on-air journalist for NBC affiliate WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio, now has a staff of 125 reporters at 101 schools around the country. It generally pays student reporters $240 to $300 to produce three news packages a week for its website, and now, Fox’s cable networks. The site is also talking to Fox’s local affiliates for a similar placement deal.