How brands secretly buy their way into Forbes, Fast Company, and HuffPost stories

Welcome to the news business. Even your local TV station receives its news directly from businesses, who often send multiple versions of the script to fit different time allotments. This is where "PR consultants" come into play - highly paid networking people who have the inside-track to, say, Walt Mossberg, and for a fee will happily send him your story and any related materials in the hope he'll decide it's worthy of publishing in his brand. Whether or not money makes its way to the news entity, and how that factors into their decision of what to publish, is an open question ... I'll simply point out there are economic incentives at play, and leave it at that.

Macro vision ... Americans get news and updates from two sources:

- "news" entities like the paper, magazines, television news, and their related websites

- advertisements

Only in the latter is it obvious that the viewing audience is being sold a product. In the former, it's absolutely still true, it's just less obvious.

I'm surprised no-one linked to pg calling it a dozen years ago: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I don't think this is any secret, and it's why I support outright banning these types of sites from HN submissions. They never have anything remotely unique or insightful, it's just dog piling on the controversy du jour, or expounding some extremely simplistic, cliche take on a complex topic . It's no coincidence that these are the worst offenders when it comes to paywalling and punishing adblock users either. Their entire business model is predicated on clickbait, so the actual content is secondary.

I've wondered about the spectrum of behaviors/relationships that exist in PR. This article describes one end of the spectrum: straight-up pay for play. What is the slightly-less-outrageous behavior? Do big PR firms take people out to expensive lunches or get them floor seats at Knicks games (much like salespeople woo potential clients)?

This is known in the industry as an advertorial and they have been common for a very long time. Especially in trade journalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial

The worst part is that in order to avoid detection of their schemes, these writers tend to stick to big VC-funded startups. Nobody ever got fired for mentioning Uber, Lyft, Tesla, AirBnb in an article... This makes the economic environment impossible for bootstrapped startups to compete in.

Thankfully, Hacker News has no business interest.

Wait...

To all the people who say they knew it all along. Congrats.

I didn't, and seeing it presented like this is horrifying. It really begs the questions do we even have a legitimate media, and not a mercenary media that kneels to the highest bidder.

Wow:

> “To be fair I was in the wrong, but it really hurt to see that relationship come undone from an outside attack,” he said. “It was a huge setback and I've learnt my lesson.” Maybe the lesson was still setting in, though, because Chong then appeared to offer me a bribe of his own. “Is there any way we can set up a partnership together to distribute content?” he asked, in the same email. “Happy to explore remuneration.”

If this worries you, read, "Trust Me, I'm Lying" for more frightening insights into the world of journalism:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0074VTHH0/

Uber buying stories on slashdot a few years ago, which resulted in an Uber promoting story every other day, was the reason I gave up on slashdot.

I would love to see a plugin that counted brand references in a writer’s history to expose this kind of thing.

That article page had a giant whiskey advertisement in the middle of it for me. I think I'd probably prefer to read about a topic someone was paid to write about than have intrusive ads I don't care about shown to me in the middle of otherwise interesting content.

Recommended reading on the topic: Trust Me I'm Lying - Confessions of a Media Manipulator.

I assume that this is how all news that isn't either an AP wire or investigative deep dive works. The payment is just often in other forms (continued access, future employment, influence, coveted invitations...)

Difference is that startups by definition often lack the influence, status, and/or wherewithal to pay for coverage in anything other than cash.

Accepting cash for links?? That should be the Google Death Penalty for all of them. But I doubt that's going to happen, these sites probably sell a lot of ads for Google.

Check your sources. is the author marked as contributor? -> find their twitter account and check the background. Most sites have open editorial, or blogs, or contributor's section. More sites will have open editorial sections as the journos are laid off each day. And again check the source.

The practice is old, but that doesn't mean it's not corrosive.

In the early 1990s, "fake news" referred to the practice of packaging up VNR and AVR bundles, generally for local broadcast stations. These are Video and Audio News Releases, which are fully produced, including fake reporters, generally covering some corporate news. Sourcewatch has a good overview:

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Video_news_releases

And several source articles:

https://www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary

https://www.prwatch.org/fakenews2/execsummary

Hamilton Holt's 1909 book, Commercialism and Journalism, tells the story of the incredible growth of the publishing industry, fueled by six factors, but to which Holt (a publisher himself) credited advertising for virtually all of it. And to which he had extreme and justified concerns. He quotes another journalist:

There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

This from a lecture series at the University of California, Berkeley, on the Morals of Trade.

The (very long form) New York Times piece on Harvey Weinstein's abuse, and control, over Hollywood and the press, is another cautionary tale of power and its capacity to manipulate (and suppress) information.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/us/harvey-wei...

Nothing new here. I noticed it with the computer magazines in the 80's, and I'd be surprised if that wasn't a century old practice.

Disturbing, especially given the difficulty (almost impossibility) of detection.

I'm not surprised, figured it was pretty common.

As an aside, there is a guy who is very popular on Medium. He made a course on how to be a more successful writer. One of the 'benefits' of his VIP version was that he would write an article about you and put it in Huffington Post or other similarly rated publications.

Let's find an algorithm that can reliably detect this junk and turn it into a browser extension.

To be honest, I didn't think this had been a "secret" for quite a while now ...

This is really similar to the way lobbying works in government. Most lobbyists aren't blackmailing or directly buying government officials (that happens, but is often illegal and, when legal is wideley considered unethical, even among other officials, at least in the USFG). Instead, they're educating them. A typical, say, US senator doesn't have a staff that can be thoroughly expert on every topic on which that senator might need to take a position. Those topics aren't limited to things that might be affected by legislation; they also include things that might be asked of the senator in a news conference, etc. This is overwhelming, even for an extremely well-staffed office, and many offices are quite minimally staffed in non-election years.

Enter lobbyists. Their pitch isn't that they're unbiased, or that they're going to give the hypothetical official a huge kickback, future job, or secret bag of cash under the table (this sometimes happens, which sucks, but is not inherent to the practice). Rather, the pitch is that, while they are biased, they will inform the official about a topic they wouldn't otherwise know--or even know they needed to know about! Consider an about-to-break scandal in a weapons manufacturer that has been manufacturing malfunctioning guns, or some other relatively obscure topic (e.g. something massively overshadowed in the officially staffed military-research department by, say, headline items like the F-35 fighter expenditures). A lobbyist for that weapons company visits an official's office and gives them a rundown on how that company works, why its practices are (supposedly) ethical, how the malfunctioning gun works, et cetera. Now, whoever is listening to this pitch (and many/most lobbyists aren't heard directly by the senator/official who runs an office) knows this lobbyist's bias, but they also know that this is valuable information, because the choice is between knowing nothing of an area and being, albeit biasedly, prepared for upcoming press-ambush questions or similar. This can also help direct in-staff research.

Now, is this harmful? It definitely can be. But just like the PR-provided "journalism" discussed in this article, it may also be the only way that some information, however biased, gets into print in the first place. Given that most people don't (or don't have time/resources/ability to) do independent primary-source research on anything that might be newsworthy, I'm not prepared to universally condemn this practice.

Aside: there are a few limited alternatives for USFG officials to get information from. The Congressional Research Service can prepare briefs for offices who don't have the staffs to research on their own, and there are many other similar options, but you still have to know what to ask for information about. Vested interests (lobbyists) are very good at filtering for relevance . . . to their own interests, which is sometimes better than nothing.

There's also no reason constituents, or groups thereof, can't request an appointment with an official's office to convey info, just like lobbyists. Lobbyists are often given preferential treatment in such situations because they're known to be useful and informative (though there are certainly plenty of cases where they're given that treatment because they're offering kickbacks and take advantage of corruption and/or greed on the part of the people they're meeting with). Again, I'm not defending lobbying in all, or perhaps even most of, its forms. But I do think that lobbying, or PR-provided news, are not inherently unethical practices.

EDIT: so many typos.

Not really clear why this is a "surprise" unless that has been manufactured for excitement purposes. The articles in any single-line publication are all essentially ads.

Consider the travel, fashion and car sections of the newspaper: do you think they are really funded by the paper? Back when I got a newspaper on mushed up trees we always chucked those sections in the bin when fetching the Sunday paper. The sport section is pretty much ads too.

So I assume that almost all the articles in "business" or "tech" are essentially placed. Some sites wear their allegiance on their sleeve, which sometimes, ironically, makes them more impartial (I consider Ads Technica an example -- their apple coverage is for and by apple enthusiasts, by and large, but on that basis, ironically, can be critical of apple).

Then again, even in mainline news, someone chooses what to report on, and really they aren't impartial.

lobbyists write our laws

PR reps write our news