The coinage is attributed to William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, when he was asked about the morality of drawing support for his charitable institution from money bags that, in some cases, might be trying to atone for, or distract from, the distasteful ways in which they acquired all that wealth in the first place.
As The Salt Lake Tribune goes forward into the brave new world of being a — deliberately — nonprofit institution, those charting that course are designing what has been helpfully described as “a very clear firewall” between the board that will run the nonprofit structure and the journalists who struggle to put out the paper and feed the website from day to day and hour to hour.