When William Randolph Hearst died in 1951, television was only just beginning to firm its grip on American culture and newspapers still set the agenda. The Internet hadn’t even been imagined. Yet, I believe, it’s safe to say that if Hearst the man could weigh in on Hearst the company’s latest acquisition — not a newspaper, a magazine or even a website, but a company specializing in buying search keywords and performing social media — he’d like it.

Hearst, after all, was the guy who uttered this immortal line: “Putting out a newspaper without promotion is like winking at a girl in the dark — well-intentioned, but ineffective.”

It’s a sentiment that might be well-over a half-century old but one many publishers still struggle to understand. Hearst knew it wasn’t enough to just produce news stories, how ever well-reported or beautifully-written, and hope that readers would come. Even in the primitive tech environment of Hearst’s time, news media suffered from fragmentation, with multiple broadsheets and tabloids competing for reader’s interest in any given city or town.

Hearst knew that to succeed in that cluttered environment a publisher had to be a bit P.T. Barnum. And, as a result, the Hearst name will forever be associated with yellow journalism techniques that led to a war and mainstream acceptance of all kinds of crazy psuedoscience.

The point here is not that audience development should come at the expense of truth, but that you can’t ignore the environment in which your content lives. If you do, it won’t live for long. That’s as true now as it was then. The difference today is rather than be part Barnum, it’s best to be part Ballmer.

That’s why the company that William Randolph Hearst began building in 1887 has just dropped a reported (and unconfirmed) $325 million on a company called iCrossing, which provides a variety of digital marketing services for a number of big advertisers.

Hearst isn’t the first legacy print publisher to do this kind of deal. Meredith, publisher of Better Homes and Gardens and other titles, has led the way on offering digital services, having created a customer relationship management and analytics offering. Gannett- and McClatchy-owned newspapers are both now offering search engine optimization services, among other, to clients, opening a big door for local businesses struggling to get their message out online. And we’ll probably see similar deals at a smaller scale, because there aren’t too many independent companies left with the girth of an iCrossing.

As Peter Hershberg, who sold Reprise Media, the search marketing firm co-founded with Josh Stylman, to Interpublic Group a few years back, wrote in an email: “This is further evidence that search has basically ‘won.’ Media companies are turning to companies that have their roots in search (even if their offerings became broader) when making acquisitions, despite the fact that there are a lot of independent agencies out there. Beyond offering search/agency services to Hearst clients, there could be an arbitrage play with Kaboodle, Hearst’s shopping site. It also infuses a lot of digital talent into a company that based on its roots, probably has very little.”

It clearly remains to be see whether the deal will pay out. It’s never easy to merge cultures, especially ones as different as technology and print publishing. Nevertheless, it’s clearly the kind of move that will reduce the odds Hearst’s current generation of leaders will be left blinking in the dark.

Matt Creamer is executive editor of Breaking Media. You can follow him on Twitter at @matt_creamer.