One Kings Lane, an e-commerce company that sells designer home décor and furnishings, just acquired Helicopter, the hotshot design firm that helped start the well-crafted and much-missed Domino magazine, as well as doing work for mainstream publishers like The Wall Street Journal, Hachette, Time Inc. and Hearst.

Apart from its burgeoning Web site, Net-A-Porter’s iPad app takes commerce and content not only mobile, but one step further. The magazine (if that’s what it is) offers a pleasing editorial narrative in the horizontal format with a parade of models and various frocks, but when the user turns the device to portrait mode, individual items pop in a retail environment, ready to buy with the swipe of a finger. And the twin revenue streams of advertising from other brands and transactions make it a promising proposition.

Lucky, Condé Nast’s shopping magazine, neatly foresaw this future of editorial and advertising elements blending into a single reader experience, but the company did not take the last step of making it a place that people could buy from. Adam Lavelle, the chief strategy office of iCrossing, the digital marketing agency owned by Hearst, believes that those old lines are fast disappearing.

“The days when you only had someone put together a television or a magazine ad out there and then waited three months to see if it worked are over,” he said. “The old line separating church and state is not gone, but is definitely a more blurry one. And brands that are authentic, not shameless or opportunistic, have a chance to create content that people will pay attention to.”

With the acquisition of iCrossing, Hearst is working quickly to build out consumer experiences that go beyond the traditional dyad of editorial girded by advertising, in part because advertisers expect more and will go elsewhere  or do it themselves  to get it.

Editorial credibility, once the sole province of old-line publishing houses, is now being bought and paid for by the brands themselves. Mr. Langmead, the former Esquire editor, will oversee Mr. Porter, a male-oriented online retail site that will serve as a companion to Net-A-Porter.

Andrea Linett, the former creative director of Lucky, has gone on to become eBay’s fashion creative director, while Melissa Biggs Bradley, the founding editor of Town and Country Travel for Hearst, is now the chief executive at the travel site Indagare. And many journalists who were pushed aside as publishing withered are now finding that brands in search of an audience are still interested in what they do.