There are certain words in our language that need to be replaced occasionally because of context. Think “used car” becoming “previously owned vehicle,” or “garbage man” becoming “sanitation engineer,” or “undertaker” morphing into “mortician” and then “funeral director” and probably “bereavement facilitator” next. Or the various, now-unspoken descriptors for racial and ethnic groups and people with disabilities.

And in this age of grasping for revenue in the news business, we have “advertorial” becoming “sponsored content” and now, apparently, “content revenue.”

So I gather from a recent Brattleboro Reformer story about the hiring of longtime radio personality Peter “Fish” Case as “director of content revenue” for the paper’s parent company Vermont News & Media — the outfit owned by not-at-all-fishy Belarusian currency trader Paul Belogour.

We’ll get back to the whole “content revenue” thing and how it might affect the journalism on offer at Belogour’s three papers, The Reformer, The Bennington Banner, and The Manchester Journal. But there’s a more immediate question about the ethics of Case’s hiring that goes absolutely unmentioned in The Reformer‘s story about the hire. (The piece carries no byline, which means it wasn’t written by a reporter or editor. It’s a glorified press release, is what it is. There’s a little red flag off the top.)

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