Yes, this is obviously paid content marketing material.
EDIT: The Pearl team mass downvoted me. :(
EDIT: The Pearl team mass downvoted me. :(
Paul Graham on PR from 2005: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
"PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.
If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them."
If a news outlet so much as carries an article about a given topic, they are exercising discretion and leaving themselves open to accusations of bias... Really it's NPoV that is the unachievable ideal.
I think it's an important lesson to learn how to discern whether articles are "paid marketing" or "content marketing" (or biased in other ways). Not many people know how to do this kind of critical thinking -- look at the "fake news" debacle (if anything, there is a certain blind trust people place in authority figures like the NYT).
The transparency (or lack thereof) of this particular article is an important observation to note.
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/as-print-fa...
"There is, however, an inherent problem: If native ads look too much like journalism, they damage credibility; if they look nothing like journalism, they lose their appeal to advertisers."
Here's an example: http://paidpost.nytimes.com/cole-haan/grit-and-grace.html?_r...
They could have instigated it. But they didn't pay for it. This wasn't paid for out of their ad budget.
It's a huge win for their PR department - because they got the NYT to write that article (or were very pleasantly surprised to see it). Not paid for it.
So the paidpost subdomain means nothing? I'm curious if that's true as it seems a rather odd choice for a subdomain.
The subdomain isn't the point, however. I was clarifying a misunderstanding in the thread.
If you're aware of paid content in the NYT that isn't marked Paid Post or something similar, please let me know.
Also, describing the NYT in such a manner is an "appeal to authority."
Prior to this comment, I don't see where I'm arguing anything other than clarifying a difference between the Cole Haan paid post and the Pearl Automation article and that a larger organization needs more process to efficiently produce content at scale, neither of which I think is particularly contentious. Neither of which I see requires or is an appeal to authority. If you think otherwise, please feel free to point out where.
Also, @achompas's sibling post was the appeal to authority, not yours, sorry for the confusion.
I don't know what answer you're looking for beyond what I've just expressed above:
I disagree with the contention that the Pearl Automation article is a paid post or "obviously paid content marketing material".
If you consider good press to be marketing material, then yes, but I don't think this is an proper understanding of "marketing material". Or is it the idea it wasn't paid for? Even then, I don't think this article is the result of anything unethical, which I understand the label "marketing material" to imply. If you know of actual evidence that indicates such, I'm open to be convinced otherwise.
I also think you're suffering from the conflation of marketing and advertising material.
[T]he NYT is a traditional institution with strong publishing process and serious concern for "separation of church and state,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13313026
I think they're saying that they can't be trusted to be honest about their own intent. I'm not sure if that's actually an fallacious appeal to authority, as I think that entails referencing some unqualified third party, but I may very well be mistaken.
Regardless, if 'Hydraulix989 doesn't trust the NYT, I can't imagine anything short of an audit by a trusted third-party would be convincing on this issue. To be fair, I would only be convinced that the Pearl Automation article is a marketing piece if there were some concrete evidence of unethical behavior along these lines.
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/as-print-fa...
And I don't see this as an issue that's unique to any one political persuasion. The level of automatic distrust if not suspicion of bad intent all around greatly concerns me. I find myself actively and repeatedly checking myself to extend the benefit of the doubt and charity. We're increasingly and alarmingly encouraged to view things in a binary fashion, bucketing everyone into one or the other, rather than recognizing there's a wide range of values on all different issues, and that we share many even when we disagree on others.
</soapbox>
If someone is publishing a paid article, it _absolutely_ needs to be marked as such.
1. NYT does have a native advertising unit. They produce posts like the one I linked earlier -- that article was sponsored by Cole Haan.
2. The Pearl article is not a native ad. If it were, it would be clearly marked as such (like the article I linked). It could be PR, but that's par for the tech industry (see: Apple's controlled leaks via WSJ/NYT over the years).