We find ourselves, once again, completely in Jeff Jarvis’ camp on the issue of tearing down the advertising/editorial wall. Jarvis makes his case here in response a thoughtful but retro post by the Guardian’s Roy Greenslade. The ad/edit wall that has existed in newspapers for the last three generations is a luxury that media institutions can no longer afford and also an insult to the journalists within them. Are reporters children who are so incapable of safeguarding their own integrity that they need to be shielded from the business? Are advertisers such a corrupting force that they must be prohibited from any contact with the people who create the product they support with their ad dollars?
Jarvis notes that nearly everyone who’s starting a media operation these days has to wear both editorial and sales hats. And guess what? Many of them still manage to deliver fine products. In fact, we’d argue that the informal standards that top bloggers apply to their work are at least as good as the written standards put forth by various news organizations. That’s because integrity is one of the few assets media people have, and they know that bartering it away undermines their future. Readers are also smart enough to figure out when they’re being taken for a ride.
We’d go one step further and suggest that one reason that the American public has been blindsided by affairs like the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the S&L meltdown is that the quality of business journalism in this country is so terrible. At most newspapers, the business desk is either Siberia or a necessary labor one must complete on the track to a glamor job in the State House. How can a company like Enron build a financial house of cards that ultimately collapses and throws 20,000 people out of work without someone at the Houston Chronicle noticing if something was fishy (BTW, did you know Enron had a code of ethics?)
Probably because newspaper reporters have traditionally been told that business is evil, ad-buyers are a corrupting influence and you’re best off staying as far away as possible. That’s not really an option any more, and maybe the new breed of online publishers will prove that journalists don’t have to be treated like 10-year-olds in order to do their jobs effectively.
Miscellany
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorialist Leonard Pitts, Jr.
has kicked off quite a ruckus at the Miami Herald over his skewering of citizen journalism. His target is James O’Keefe III, the political activist whose hidden-camera wizardry is credited with bringing down the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). It turns out O’Keefe’s videos exhibited questionable editing practices that caused prosecutors to decline to file charges. What’s more, O’Keefe has been in a raft of trouble since then. “It is a mark of the low regard in which journalism is held that that load of bull pucky ever passed as wisdom,” Pitts writes. “If some woman flashed a toy badge, would you call her a citizen police officer? Would you trust your health to a citizen doctor just because he produced a syringe?” No, but the contexts there are somewhat different. We agree that the O’Keefe case is an example of citizen journalism gone wrong, but we think trashing the whole concept over a few bad examples is no more responsible than dismissing traditional journalism because of Jayson Blair. About 80 commenters weigh with their views.
Let’s keep this death watch thing in perspective. World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers CEO Christoph Riess told the World Editor’s Forum in Hamburg last week, “Whatever form the newspaper takes, it will remain the dominant media force in the world.” He cited the 61% growth in print newspaper circulation in 185 countries over the last year as evidence, and noted that print newspapers “reach more audience than the Internet.”Riess is right that newspaper circulation is growing dramatically in many developing countries. However, whether that trend holds up for long is questionable. As these economies mature, it’s likely that more-prosperous citizens will leap directly to online outlets and bypass the 15-year learning curve that the U.S. went through.
Which may not be such a bad thing. Scarborough Research reports that the 9 million people who use e-readers are also avid news consumers. “E-Reader households are 11% more likely to read a newspaper regularly than an average adult,” writes Editor & Publisher. What’s more, e-reader households are nearly 50% more likely than average consumers to visit a newspaper website. You can find the press release here.
And Finally…
From The Onion:
Citing a desire to gain influence in Washington, the American people confirmed Friday that they have hired high-powered D.C. lobbyist Jack Weldon of the firm Patton Boggs to help advance their agenda in Congress.
Known among Beltway insiders for his ability to sway public policy on behalf of massive corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, Monsanto, and AT&T, Weldon, 53, is expected to use his vast network of political connections to give his new client a voice in the legislative process.
Comments
This entry was posted on Monday, October 11th, 2010 at 7:24 am and is filed under Fake News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Problem is that business doesn’t need ANY reportage, it needs:
a place for good PR that IT writes and controls,
a place to have product announcements and
a place for favorable product reviews.
Business couldn’t give a fig for good reportage. In fact its quite hostile to it.
The essence of good reportage is the unvarnished truth.
Business doesn’t like the unvarnished truth. It wants to apply their own varnish.
Reportage as a money making venture is pretty much over.
It coexisted and can still coexists with commerce only when the reportage exists in an almost separate sphere from the area of business.
How many articles on slave conditions in sweat-shop garment factories have been carried by “Women’s Wear Daily”?
How many articles about the hazards of shoddy medical treatment are broken by medical journals?
How many [shoddy industry “I” practice] articles are covered by [industry “I” covering organization]?
Publish a newspaper?
Find yourself a techie and pay to have an app written for the various iPhone, iPad, Android, Nokia platforms available.
Get out of print and get off the web, now.
Information silos are the only way to make money for news reportage organizations.
Finding people who would rely on your information is <bnot the problem.
With world wide advertising/promotion for your apps, announcing the specifics of your particular silo to search engines, you should be able to recruit buyers for the app.
They just need to be interested enough in the reportage organization coverage of the silo to buy the coverage for a given period of time.
Think of “Women’s Wear Daily” as a readership supported journal charging $25.00/quarter. Now apply the economies of scale to essentially free dissemination/distribution of content.
Now go forth and just do it.
“Are advertisers such a corrupting force that they must be prohibited from any contact with the people who create the product they support with their ad dollars?” Absofuckinglutely. Let’s take Hollywood. You think the guy selling the film ads can be the film critic? Are you nuts? You think it’s beneath film studios to cancel thousands of dollars of advertising if they don’t like a review? Or let’s say you review cars and Ford lends you their latest with the hint that if they like the review, you might get to keep it. There’s a reason I trust Consumer Reports more than Car and Driver. Consumer reports accepts no advertising. The standard is that editorial is worth ten times more than advertising, i.e. your average reader is ten times more likely to believe nice things from a restaurant review than from a restaurant advertisement. Advertisers ALWAYS want a quid pro quo with editorial, but news is what people DON’T want you to know. It’s the opposite of advertising. Tearing down the wall is the death of objectivity.
A rather interesting example of a somewhat different business model seems to be the
Global Post, an online publication started last year. Access is free with subscriptions as options:
http://www.globalpost.com/
I agree that the wall should be torn down and that journalists are big boys and girls; they can handle wearing both hats. I ran across a great interview with Bob Garfield, an advertising critic an analyst for ABC News, where he talks about the symbiotic relationship between media and marketing and where things are heading. I’ll include the link. It’s definitely worth watching. http://www.ourblook.com/topic/future_of_advertising.html
So what did the NYTimes do today? (Friday October 15, 2010) GAVE away their iPad app.
I guess later they hope that they can charge for content, or throw in the towel and hope for a federal/state/local bailout.
That’s about as smart as Bernankey’s money policy.
The banks aren’t lending despite historically low rates, so lets lower them even further, and allow the banks to not need to lend out money to show a profit for even longer.
W.T.F. IS EVERYBODY BLIND, DEAF AND DUMB as well as STUPID?
Advertisers have a name for it when they can get media to combine editorial and business considerations. It’s called “earned advertising.” Why buy an ad when you can get some “synergy” with a media company that puts your product/service/political position on the front page or home page? It’s not just bad journalism. It’s bad business. Why buy an ad when for a fraction of the cost, you get media’s prime real estate. “Entrepeneurial” journalism that gets into bed with advertising is just advertorial. And once the advertiser has used it up and destroyed the credibility of the venue, they’ll kick it to the curb. Suicide.
I agree that the wall should be broken, and that the journalists the big boys and girls, they can create, wear hats and I ran across an interview with the great Bob Garfield, ad critic analyst for ABC News that he spoke. symbiotic relationship between media and marketing and where things are moving.