Paying journalists to promote brands in articles | Hacker News Reader

Paying journalists to promote brands in articles

theoutline.com

87 pointspmcpinto72 comments

This would happen less if the people writing the stories were paid more (so it removes some temptation on the writers part).

The problem isn't new though. After I had written a few articles for the old BYTE magazine I had the weird experience of being called up, at home (this is before Cell phones), by a company with an expensive schematic design package call me up and ask if I'd like a copy of their software. It was pretty clear they were angling to get a positive mention/review into BYTE and I turned them down, the then called Editor-in-chief Fred Langa. He laughed and said that now I was a "true" BYTE author since it indicated I had enough visibility to attract the attention of the advertisers.

"2.1 Advertisements must be obviously distinguishable from editorial content, especially if they use a situation, performance or style reminiscent of editorial content, to prevent the audience being confused between the two. The audience should quickly recognise the message as an advertisement."

https://www.asa.org.uk/type/broadcast/code_section/02.html

“ – Deny favored treatment to advertisers, donors or any other special interests, and resist internal and external pressure to influence coverage.

– Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two. Prominently label sponsored content. ”

https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp (Society of Professional Journalists)

“ 2.3 Readers are entitled to expect that the content of the press reflects the best judgment of editors and writers and has not been inappropriately influenced by undisclosed interests. Wherever relevant, any significant financial interest of an organization should be disclosed. Writers should disclose significant potential conflicts of interest to their editors. ”

http://www.presscouncil.ie/code-of-practice

There may actually be a technological fix for this. One can use [computational stylometry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry#Current_research) to analyse a blogger's (sorry, I mean journalist's) written output. The algo performs clustering, any articles not written by the author are shown up as outliers. Author attribution works because everybody uses function words differently from each other but fairly consistently over time. If an author has 150+ articles you'd definitely spot copy that came from another source I'd say!

I have previously seen The Telegraph as a relatively serious publication, but we were approached by a person from them who reached out to us for an interview. Only after the interview, they told us that it was for an ad-campaign and that they wanted money for it to be published.

Looking back at the email conversation, they weren't blatantly lying but used weasel-wording to make it appear as being editorial content.

Having a background as a journalist, this was shocking for me.

> Having a background as a journalist, this was shocking for me.

In other words: having a background as a journalist, he shocked you? Do you see where your "background as a journalist" failed miserably?

If you're getting paid to do this you are not a journalist. Can we please stop using the word journalist / journalism when we mean: reporter, hack, whore, propagandist, marketer, etc.?

IMHO your suggestion makes it unnecessarily easy for other journalists to distance themselves. "Nonono, THAT guy is not really a Journalist! Among us, the REAL Journalists, there's no systemic problem whatsoever!"

Same applies for other groups and their swept-under-the-carpet problems, I don't really want to bash on Journalists specifically.

IMHO your suggestion makes it unnecessarily easy for other journalists to distance themselves.

GOOD. If you're someone who works earnestly to report affairs objectively and without the influence of money to promote $thing_goes_here, it is absolutely an imperative for you and the integrity of your outlet and profession to call this behavior when it happens.

How did you get to "...no systemic problem...? I got lost.

In any case, that wouldn't be a problem for real journalists. A real journalists asks questions. Lots of questions. Hard questions. And that includes where they gaze into the mataphorical mirror.

In order words, yeah journalism has issues. But we don't need to voluntarily get sucked into that vortex. Just because they don't police thrmselves doesn't me we have to be stupid as well. The headline of this article is wrong. The fact that the author is so mistaken is a very bad sign all around.

Could you give an example where you've seen someone use the word "journalist" when you think they should have been using "whore"?

I propose a middle ground with "whorenalist".

"influencer blogger"

The world's first Analrapist!

Example? Anderson Cooper or Chuck Todd.

Media Whore is too specific. Whore is a better fit.

This isn’t a secret among marketers. They talk about it very openly amongst themselves.

This is why, when you see the Forbes, Inc, Business Insider, or HuffPo logo on the site of an “expert” or startup company, you know they are bullshitting—those “press mentions” were, most likely, paid for.

In both the current company I work in, and the company before that, we had articles written about us that were pushed by the company.

I don't think that money was involved, but the marketing copy (wait, sorry, the "article") was basically written by us, and sent to the journos with some photos. All they had to do is upload it to the news site.

Makes an workday for the journo, and the company gets some publicity. Win-win for everyone, except people that enjoy reading quality, impartial content, rather than advertisements dressed up as legitimate articles.

This is largely how "guest blogging" works too. Marketing agencies hire writers who create content for their clients. The agencies then give the content to publishers for free, and it's published under a pseudonymous byline or the byline of an executive that typically includes a link to the client.

When you see an article in Forbes written by a CEO or some other executive, it's often ghost written by a marketing agency's writers.

almost every crypto ICO had a huffpo logo on their site. just silly ( that would not work in couple of days). and then there are the ones putting logos of bbc and the like but linking general storyes about crypto, in the hopes that the visitor would not notice that the story is not about them.

as somebody that likes crypto i hate this.

When I worked at a financial services company we constantly had to find uses for whatever tech the CIO had bought without our input, yet really had no use for. Inevitably there would be an article on the company's website by him about how wonderful the tech was and how it was making everything easier. We suspected (and later were proved right) he was getting massive kickbacks. Long after I left he was walked out the door when a new CEO was hired.

This is illegal right? Warner Bros. had an FTC settlement because they paid youtubers for video game reviews, and that fact wasn't disclosed by many of the youtubers.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/07/warne...

Probably is, but it wouldn't surprise me at all if parts of the press just didn't think the FTC rules applied to them. (I know they had to have sharp words with quite a few publications about actually following their rules on affiliate links, and that's a lot more publicly visible and easy to prove than the stuff alleged here.)

Pretty obvious when you read practically anything these days that PR has taken over not just promotions but the entire narrative.

sites like reddit are plagued of users inserting brands into the comment, seems like a place full of marketers...

Totally agree, I wrote about it on my blog http://myblogclickhere.com/lookatmyblog.html.

404

It’s a joke.

... and a pretty good one too.

Guess I'm an idiot heh, totally missed that

I really enjoy reading that blog on my LG Ultrawide monitor!

The new Dell 38” 21:9 is actually way better!

Places with user generated content used to be where a lot of people would go to get bullshit free opinions and reviews also.

Then the marketing departments caught on to that and proceeded to poison that well.

Quora is more disgusting, people ostensibly pretend to answer questions, however most answers are just advertisements to products

Can you point me to such answers? Because for the past month or so, I open quora, see the question "What's the sluttiest thing you have done", and close it off.

It’s a stretch to call the people accepting these payments journalists although the lines are admittedly blurry these days.

I doubt there was ever a golden age when journalism was pure.

Are you claiming all journalists are corrupt?

"This file may be named image.jpg, but there is no JPEG data in it to be parsed."

"I doubt there was ever a golden age where technology was perfect."

"A very keen observation, this still isn't a JPEG file though."

I think it was a response to 'the lines are blurry these days'

Are you sure? Surely they realize that someone saying the lines are blurry "these days" does in no way imply that they have not always been blurry.

It kinda does, though. If I say 'it's really cloudy these days' it implies that at some point it was not cloudy

Of course not, but there was a time when most people got their news from sources that at the very least paid lip service to journalistic integrity.

Why is someone paying lip service (which I interpret to mean they know their actions are wrong, they don't stop doing it, they just say some of the right things) better?

What I mean to say is, they had standards that they stated openly and tried to uphold. I'm sure they failed sometimes, as all humans do, but at least they tried.

I'm somewhat in the small indy publishing world and we call them bloggers. It's assumed bloggers are the ones willing to do anything for views and money while journalists are the ones making sure their sourcing factual information.

* Not to say all bloggers do that!

I'm not really sure that's true anymore - journalists are the ones obsessing over the links between Donald Trump [1]'s hands and his penis, piss-gate, editing videos for fake fish-food dumping stories, changing the dates on conversations from after to before the election to suit conspiracy theories and then having to apologise when discovered, and other items where a) facts are either not sought or b) outright lies created.

[1] I happen to dislike Donald Trump intensely, but the fact that some people would need to confirm a political stance before willing to accept cases where there is no visible evidence of truth or evidence of outright fabrication indicates those people are part of the problem.

NPR does this. I don't like it. "... blah blah. For more on this story, Joan Smith joins us via Skype."

The sound quality is often terrible, and this being radio they could have easily done this over high quality phone.

But I'm sure NPR gets "support" from Microsoft for this.

How soon before "Joan Smith joins us via Verizon, with her LG phone."

> NPR does this. I don't like it. "... blah blah. For more on this story, Joan Smith joins us via Skype."

This sounds like extremely weak evidence that NPR is getting paid by Microsoft. Maybe they're just saying "via Skype" because the call is, in fact, via Skype, or to explain the poor sound quality?

I'm honestly inclined to agree. It was common on television news for the studio crew to introduce off site reporters as "So and so joins us by satellite".

I doubt "satellite" was paying them to say it

Skype is far better than when they call from a cell. Ditto with podcasts. I will usually skip the episode if the guest is on a cell.

You really need more evidence before smearing a respected name such as NPR.

Especially if the benign explanation is as believable as it is here: Skype has simply become a word of common usage.

Journalists operate in the real world. They will use brand names to the same extend that evreryone does. Artificially avoiding them would limit their ability to tell stories as much as avoiding words that start with the letter H would.

I would hope an NPR journalist wouldn't use Skype as a general term. But it seems reasonable that, when using Skype, they say they do either to explain the quality or because they're required to as someone else said. That said, I'm not sure I've ever personally heard this on a podcast.

Skype requires a verbal announcement if used on a broadcast. It does feel weird, but it's the cost of using free software. https://www.skype.com/en/legal/broadcast/

Is enough of a reason that journalists should dump Skype

I lot of people they call likely only have Skype (or similar) and cell at their home. It's unfortunate that phone call quality has actually decreased a lot of the time since 50 years ago. But that's what you give up for dramatically lower costs and mobility.

I think you have an idealized view of journalism and media that doesn't align with reality. Kick backs, side deals, "back scratching", etc has always existed in journalism and media. And it's not just journalists. The owners of media companies and editors also trade influence for money, access, etc. It's not just with brands/advertising, this also applies to their coverage of politics, sports, etc.

Funny no one mentions Google, all this is done purely for the SEO juice. We've heard it for years, links don't matter that much these days.. but in fact they do matter.

Imho Google needs to fix this, not the content farms that Google thinks are "trusted" news sources.

I always dreamed of a news site that is just like Wikipedia, but has the mechanics of HN (upvote, downvote, flag, etc.). So that, you can weed out all these middlemen agents and crooked journalists who poison our news consumption.

No voting mechanics as far as I am aware but perhaps something like [Wikitribune][0]?

[0]: https://www.wikitribune.com/story/2017/12/07/media/ft-can-wi...

Because upvotes and downvotes did such a wonderful job of keeping shilling off reddit?

I don't follow.

> but has the mechanics of HN

> keeping shilling off reddit?

They do a pretty good job on HN. That's my point. I understand why you cite Reddit, but that's not my point.

Clearly the mechanics of upvoting/downvoting don't prevent shilling at scale. HN is just small enough to not attract large numbers of dedicated shills.

Are you under the impression that HN is impartial?

HN is getting just as bad as Reddit. Look at how many posts are links to "news" sites.

If you want to add voting to Wikipedia, you have understood neither voting, nor Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events

Mostly this seems to work so well on HN is because moderators are excellent at keeping politically loaded discussions under control. They are the poison for every community.

That is actually kind of exactly what http://www.nwzer.com is about. (You can sign up for alpha there)

nwzer's statement: What if Reddit, Twitter and Wikipedia had a baby?

These journalists should just call their critics racist and sexist. It worked during the Gamergate scandal.

I wish that TV shows and movies had to disclose which companies paid for product/brand placement.

We do it for our politicians...why stop there

Since the publishing industry as a whole is on the edge of bankruptcy, this is just a response to ad blockers not being able to block these kinds of ads. You didn't want ads, you get them anyway as part of fake reporting.

People running ad blockers shouldn't have an opinion on how publishers run their operations. It's just tit for tat.

A vicious cycle that's triggered by a perpetually degenerative and complacent society. This is a problem that runs through everything - social media, education, health sectors, the job market, etc. Marketing something that's really worth little as being world changing.

To the point of paid journaliists.

The media isn't paid well, not nearly as good as other career options (depending on where you are). It's because journalism (magazines, TV shows and web sites) are expected to pay for a service for free. They need to pay salaries, buy equipment, operate their business. This money has to come from advertisements.

Advertisers, marketeers, PR folk are constantly paying less because there are abundant channels to pick from (web sites, magazines, TV channels) to promote their brands. There's someone who'll accept little to do the same job. The concept of an 'advertorial' is fading. Advetisers know their agenda gets diluted / ignored by using advertorials, so they've found a marketing gimmick to do the same - promote their content through legit channels and that's what we see. This is what earns them their bread and butter.

When journalists look at other media houses getting a piece of the pie (big exclusive breaks, perks and good relations with big names), they want it too, so they become more willing to do so. We as consumers of journalistic media aren't willing to pay them neither do we don't want the ads either.

As a society, we're only getting 'cheaper'. Perception owns more importance than reality. We love what we consume, it stimulates us what politicians say, what products we see our stars eat, drink, use. Advertisers and media provide what is demanded.

Tone down the moral panic. The 'Style', 'Food' and 'Travel' sections in newspapers have been bought forever and this is more of the same in a different era.

I've always been most interested in why European goods are seen as luxurious in North America despite usually objectively being nothing special (wines that aren't any better in blind taste tests, cars of average reliability, bogus health claims of olive oil). You can usually trace this back to some mid-20th century group of journalists or experts getting a fully paid trip to Italy or France by some interested industry group.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com