Lots of people like to talk about the death of media 1.0. But I like to think of it as the death of journalism as a fancy profession. Here’s another example.

Former MSNBC general manager Dan Abrams has created a new PR venture called Abrams Research. Nothing new there. But this one has a twist. For a fee, he will gather up a group of other journalists who’ll critique your work and offer advice for an hourly fee. Meanwhile, of course, he’s still “chief legal correspondent” for NBC News.

The spectacle of a former news exec bundling the advice of other news pros has a lot of people “creeped out.” His partner, former HuffPo blogger Rachel Sklar says “I give advice to people all the time privately — and I seek it. . . . [W]hat is not to trust about having a conference calls with three twentysomething[s] . . . to get a grip on social networking?”

Well, maybe it’s because these three twentysomethings are also passing themselves off as news people.

Maybe you remember the liberal media uproar when Armstrong Williams was discovered to be paid by the government to write nice things about them. To their credit, the liberal side of things is pretty scandalized about this, too.

Meanwhile, Dan Abrams says they have lots of rules and such to make sure there won’t be any ethical lapses.

This sounds like a good way to create good PR strategies – but the problem actually comes on the supply side. You can’t really be a Journalist and also sell PR advice. It happens all the time, I know, and that’s the point: journalism as a profession is dying out.

With citizen journalism – like what we are doing right now – on the rise, old-fashioned journalists aren’t able to hide behind phony professionalism or ethics codes anymore. But we do need a new set of rules of the road – how do you know whether to trust me? How do you know I am not right now selling advice to my vast throng of readers?