The Rest Is Advertising – Confessions of a Sponsored Content Writer

> Money will find its way. People will find their information and entertainment. New channels will form. Capitalism works quite well for this.

Depends on what you call 'working well': we currently witness the direct consequences of the commoditization of what could arguably be considered as a public service--namely, access to trustworthy information for all--, but somehow some still have faith in that model.

You are perfectly right that money will find its way, but the question is: whose money, and for what goal? Big corporation or mogul's money, who want to buy mindshare in public opinion and trade it for influence in the political sphere, like, say, the good media networks of M.Berlusconi, Bouygues and tons of others?

I think as the 'Fourth Estate' there's a definite need for Journalism to stay well away from government funding, control and oversight - while I would contend almost all journalists are capable of setting aside any biases such a funding model might create, 'Journalism must be done fairly, and it must be seen to be done fairly' and being dependent on the government makes it hard for a populace to believe it's objectively investigating the government.

But you encounter the same issue if you suggest, say, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ought to fund "high-quality" journalism. (When was the last time the WashPo ran a scathing attack on Amazon?) Even some kind of group model - part government, part philanthropist, part donors will always create a perception of bias.

I'm mixed on your point about Capitalism. Yes, 'the market' will deliver what the people want, but not always what they need ('in the public interest' v 'of interest to the public'). A government example might work here - would taxpayers in one state willingly contribute money to a road project in another? I suspect not - taxes aren't voluntary for just that reason. Longform investigative journalism, I feel, would similarly not be funded by sufficient people. And I think that would usher in a new era of corruption in most capitalist nations.

Capitalist press is pretty bad, and always has been. ""Freedom of the press ... is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to.""

(While digging for that quote I found http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/30/censors... , which sums up the problem)

At least there is a tradition of stating your affiliations and monetary interests up front. But still, good point. Recent bitcoin debacle is a good example - with both parties accusing each other of staging a FUD-spreading campaign in social media and on discussion sites.

Yes, but suspecting that every article has an unstated source of influence other than author's own opinion is the whole new level of paranoia. Articles throwing lavish praise at some particular corporation are the easiest - just dismiss them. But when there is no evident source of influence, my mind races to build a mini-conspiracy theory - who is trying to tell me this and why? As I've said, tiring.

It has been tried (though you could argue not well.) I feel like it was either Yahoo or AOL who tried hyperlocal news and it did not gain traction.

However, you could argue that this lack of traction was due to the climate of the users and what they were interested in at the time, they also (if I remember correctly) were actively paying local "reporters" who had a specific local beat.

In Austin we have the fabulous Austin Monitor [1]. You want to know whether Commissioners Court is going to add shoulders to your county road? The Monitor's your destination. And on the topic of sponsored content, I just visited it, and found this editorial comment:

"I’ll use this space to note that, while sponsorship revenue is key to our survival, we remain hesitant to test the waters of sponsored content for the Monitor. Many – most? – of our colleagues around the news publication world have settled on this concept as a way to quickly boost revenue in an ecosystem starved for it. But we worry about the impact it would have on our credibility.

"That said, we’ve experimented with a version of what the Voice of San Diego calls “Partner Voices,” a space for sponsored content from area nonprofits. To make this work – read: to keep it off the Monitor‘s page – we figured we’d post it on the CoTMF website. Thus far, we’ve found little interest, but we’re happy to continue to entertain the idea."[2]

[1] http://www.austinmonitor.com

[2] http://www.austinmonitor.com/stories/2016/03/publishers-note...

The source of the content is irrelevant (however interesting, TIL). There are too many companies disseminating the same content, as you point out, for free to make the other companies viable unless the consumers feel particularly inclined to that given company. The New York Times, for example, would probably have an easier time getting subscribers than the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald because they have more reputation, deserved or not.

From pure market forces though which the vast majority of consumers operate on, they have no reason to subscribe to NYT -or- DTH because there are a thousand other small papers distributing that same article as you've pointed out for free.

ESPN makes big bucks off football--in particular. FiveThirtyEight adds Dara-driven highbrow to their coverage. The rest is even more loss leader.

"Good" journalism is extremely subjective and in my experience aligns more with the political leanings of the consumer than with any measurable qualities. I'm not saying it's ALL crap of course, there are plenty of real reporters researching real things (ironically enough, most of them are at Buzzfeed lately) but the vast majority of coverage is just parroting other publications with their own slant added to avoid copyright issues. I mean how many times has some completely made up and utterly nonsense story gone from a twitter post to all over our most credible newspapers because nobody bothered to Google it before putting on Page 1?

The silence... is deafening.

> Okay, but how can it change?

I'm pretty sure this is a "yellow journalism period" on the internet but it will get worse before it gets better since the common man needs to completely lose faith in these rags like they did with tabloids.

Clickbait is alot like the tabloids and yellow journalism of print media, honestly.

> Where will the money come from?

Subscriptions most likely. It'll be newspapers written to favor the desires/biases of the upper middle class who would consider dropping $100/year for such a thing.

>Where will the money come from?

This is the $99gajillion question.

People won't pay for actual journalism while sponsored content is free and looks enough like the real thing.

Ad revenues are tanking across the board for everyone except the platforms. Ad expenditures are rising, though, so there's a suggestion that this will not continue forever and that one day ad-supported business models will become viable again.

But probably not soon enough, or at high enough levels, to support journalism as it used to be. That's dead and gone. All we're talking about now is what comes after.

The real sadness is investigative journalism, especially as a democratic tool. Without someone poking their nose where it's not wanted (and a mechanism for paying them to do that) our society is at a much greater danger of corruption.

I'm not a dystopian. There is a public appetite for actual journalism, so eventually there will be a business model to cater to that. What that looks like though... no idea

The problem is that the content that's "free and free of advertising" probably won't be very good, or very well researched, or independent.

High quality content often depends on access (which can be hard or impossible to get even if you're a real journalist), a lot of time, and quite a lot of input from support staff (editors, subeditors, researchers, picture editors etc).

> So now the question is do enough people actually put enough value on real news to employ journalists to do their work. Right now it looks bleak.

Agreed.

So that eliminates almost all the financial stories, all the hardware and software reviews, and all the sports coverage, just for starters ;-)