Uber, Google and others pay London Evening Standard for favorable coverage
opendemocracy.net
opendemocracy.net
https://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/house-of-cards/the-asc...
The other part of this is that paid editorial content -- i.e. news stories that are not disclosed as being ads -- would seem to violate the UK's advertising standards:
https://www.asa.org.uk/type/non_broadcast/code_section/02.ht...
https://www.asa.org.uk/news/online-influencers-is-it-an-ad.h...
Perhaps the article has changed since the parent, read it, but there are many details asserted.
> promising them “money-can’t-buy” positive news and “favourable” comment coverage
> set to include “favourable” news coverage of the firms involved, with readers unable to differentiate between "news" that is paid-for and other commercially-branded content.
> Unbranded news stories, expected to be written by staff reporters – but paid for by the new commercial “partners” as part of the 2020 deal – have already been planned for inclusion in the paper’s news pages within a week of the project’s launch.
> paying partners were told that their company’s own planned communications and marketing strategies could be coordinated with the Standard’s news coverage.
> The Standard would trail positive “news” from the six 2020 partners, with other news organisations and media outlets expected to follow.
> Another executive was told the “money-can’t-buy” campaigns in the Standard aimed to create “news that will make news, but news that comes with a positive message.”
> According to one insider: “What was being offered was clear – theatrically constructed news, showing everything good being done."
That's only from maybe 60% of the article
> the six partners have also been promised the Standard will carry “money-can’t-buy” positive news and “favourable” comment pieces that will appear to readers as routine, independently written editorial.
I agree that sounds like it would run afoul of the ASA
> positive news and “favourable” comment pieces that will appear to readers as routine, independently written editorial.
Also worth noting that the Evening Standard is apparently a free newspaper, similar to Metro New York, which doesn't exactly have high editorial standards.
But as the preceding paragraph in the story notes:
> An increasing number of British newspapers often carry “native advertising”, essentially paid-for commercials designed to look like independent editorial articles.
-- the point of "native advertising" is to appear to look like independent editorial. So it's still not clear that this "London 2020" is different than that. What would make it different is if there were more details about how this content would actually be published -- e.g. in the normal news section versus the special inserts, and/or via regular writers versus PR staff.
Looks to me like they've been a bit ambiguous with promises of earned media, which is a typical goal of conventional advertising campaigns.
How many stories does this deal buy? When are these stories assigned -- e.g. does Google have a year to assign X number of stories? Does this deal include the power to kill/subvert stories -- e.g. if a privacy fuckup becomes news, Google asserts the right to have prior review and make as many changes as it wants? Who is the contact person for this on Google's side? Presumably it wouldn't just be an advertising person, it'd have to be someone fairly experienced in PR.
This is a long way of getting to the core problem: this kind of thing requires a committed conspiracy, especially in the face of possible sanctions by the UK advertising authority. If it gets exposed, besides sanctions, Google risks a massive publicity blowup. Having several editors in the loop is problematic enough -- it gets even shakier when you add in reporters who may likely rebel.
As someone who has worked in a few newsrooms, I know I'm biased into thinking that journalists will do the "noble" thing and speak out. But I don't think I'm in the wrong in this kind of situation. Even in today's emaciated industry, journalists don't have much of a problem speaking up even if it means their jobs:
- https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/univision.php
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/03/business/media/denver-pos...
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/business/media/fox-news-a...
Note that it's not just adherence to principle at play -- journalists who make a brave public stand have a chance at getting hired by other outlets.
It's not that news outlets can't have systemic bias or subservience toward commercial interests. But that usually comes via pervasive influence over time from a publisher -- i.e. the fable of the frog not jumping out of a slowly heated pot of water.
One of the best known examples of a newspaper selling out that I can think of is the LA Times' 1999 arrangement with the Staples sports center to share revenue from an issue devoted to positive coverage of the center:
https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/04/business/the-media-busine...
A few editors were apparently in the know. But once others outside of the conspiracy caught on, it immediately blew up into a major scandal.
I don't think any more came of that. The cross-advertising in Murdoch papers is so routine it's a regular feature in Private Eye. The British press is largely a disaster area.
PR agencies have ongoing relationships with journalists covering the specific areas and routinely pitch profile stories, 'innovation' stories, industry trend stories, third party research stories, topical stories that show the company they represent in good light.
And for the financial press there is a whole separate investor relations team with their own PR agencies. Similarly for government relations there are teams with their own lobbying agencies all actively engaging their targets including the media. There is nothing inherently unethical about this, though there is potential, but this is how the industry and media works.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-43976942
https://metro.co.uk/2018/05/02/matthew-wright-quit-wright-st...
A recent alleged example I can think of is Sharon Waxman, former NYT reporter who founded and runs The Wrap, claiming the paper was pressured to give up her 2004 investigation into Weinstein [0]:
> After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted.
> I was told at the time that Weinstein had visited the newsroom in person to make his displeasure known. I knew he was a major advertiser in the Times, and that he was a powerful person overall.
However, this to me is another example of why the details of the conspiracy are important. First, the NYT editors involved deny her allegations:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/reader-center/dean-baquet...
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/09/harvey-weinstein-s...
Of course, that's the kind of denial you would expect from editors trying to cover their own asses. But the strongest evidence that Waxman may not have had anything akin to what the NYT won a Pulitzer this year for reporting is Waxman's own article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/business/media/miramax-su...
It's a pretty lengthy article for what feels like insider baseball involving a little known entertainment official ("Miramax Sues Ex-Chief in Italy, Saying He Had 2 Jobs"), one that required her to spend time reporting in Italy, which is pretty good considering she was (in her own words) "a fairly new reporter" based in Los Angeles. The NYT is apparently ready to jump at Weinstein's word -- with that kind of familiarity/subservience toward Weinstein, how could editors even approve Waxman's proposed investigation (nevermind the travel expenses)?
The other thing against Waxman is the fact that she had ~8 years as the executive editor of her own Hollywood news site (The Wrap began in 2009) to pursue the investigation she claims was held. She did not. She appended an explanation to her initial article [0], in which she says "the moment had passed" because Miramax was mostly-defunct and she was too busy doing the work of raising money and running her own company. And also, Waxman writes, she did not hear of anything bad about Weinstein in the subsequent years and assumed he had reformed. It's possible had Waxman had more resources and faith from higher-ups, that she could've eventually uncovered the scandal. But it's clear she had nothing in 2004, or in the years since, that was a smoking gun about Weinstein's crimes -- she would not have sat on such a story otherwise.
I agree editorial scandal does not "require a massive conspiracy". David Simon famously alleged [1] (also known as the 5th season of "The Wire") that Baltimore Sun higher-ups looked the other way as a reporter published Pulitzer-bait fake stories. And there's of course the recent example of TMZ founder Harvey Levin's purported friendship with President Trump [2]. And there are numerous, more ambiguous cases in which an editor's/reporter's personal relationships may have influenced coverage [3] in subtle ways.
One of the most egregious examples -- in terms of obvious cause-and-effect of advertiser pressure, and the number of people involved -- is BuzzFeed's admission [4] it deleted several stories critical of advertisers because of advertisers' complaints to BuzzFeed's business team. But even in that egregious example, it's worth noting that it was exposed because BF felt compelled to do an internal investigation, which immediately got leaked to Gawker. And the examples of advertiser influence all involve ad-hoc deletions of articles that were outright critical. Even as influential as these advertisers were (and as flimsy as BF's editorial reputation was in 2015), advertisers still didn't have prior review, or other mechanisms to prevent bad press.
What's being alleged with The Evening Standard, by comparison, is a massive conspiracy. From the reporting in the submitted article, it sounds like there are meetings involving a good number of folks for ES's editorial and business side, as well as PR people from some of the most media savvy corporations. There's even a fancy PowerPoint presentation. I don't believe that corporations are above using their financial resources to bend journalism toward their ends. I just don't believe it would be done so unnecessarily out in the open and so brazenly.
[0] https://www.thewrap.com/media-enablers-harvey-weinstein-new-...
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/10/22/stealing-life
[2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/tmz-goes-maga-how-harvey-levin...
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/ombudsman/2016/02/26/467813499/...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/20/business/media/buzzfeed-s...
Time to recheck IT trends/fads as well. Think about IT coverage in this decade, or even before that: cloud (kubernetes being portrayed as the best thing since sliced bread), web frameworks (where React seems to have won this round of publicity warfare though since Fakebook is also a media powerhouse), the vulgar "HTML5 rocks" campaign to take HTML standards away from W3C for better or worse (so that browsers can have things such as geolocation, and for Chrome dominance), making it appear a grassroots effort, staged questions/answers on StackOverflow, voting rings to hide dissenting opinions, ...
The consequences of the planned EU copyright directive could be dramatic (not just for Google but also for freedom of speech, for small publishers and for AI startups) and yet big European publishers (including public broadcasters) are largely succeeding at suppressing critical reporting on the subject.
By circulation, the Standard and Metro are both in the top 5 newspapers in the U.K - but the actual readers are probably higher as you regularly find these papers left on public transport and coffee shops.
"While"? Those are two things I would expect to go together. Free literature is generally free because it expresses someone's views, and that someone wants to persuade.
I seriously cannot understand how some people (mainly employees drinking the Koolaid) still buy into it.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/technology/google-project...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=google&sort=byPopularity&prefi...
I was reminded of a front page thread a few days ago -- the NYT feature about the impact of Google's cat-loving employees on protected wild owls [0] -- in which people complained that such a trivial subject only made the NYT out of a vindictiveness towards Google
Sometimes stories drop off the front page if they have more comments than votes, as it signals a flamewar, which makes for boring reading at best and leads to uncivil behaviour or trolling at worst.
It would be pointless for HN to try and "censor" things that the community wanted to discuss, as people would just find out about it and discuss it elsewhere.
I had a seemingly reputable newspaper(Santa Barbara News-Press) offer to write a human interest story (NOT marked as advertorial) about my small business in return for placing some regular advertising with them.
Being young and foolish I thought that was an ethical no no and declined.
From then on I noticed how often there was a link between advertising and coverage in media.
In Eastern Europe this is ridiculously apparent even in localized versions of US media such as Forbes/Nat Geo/etc etc.
Conclusion: this happens all the time everywhere, if you spend money at some media, you get some say.
Sure on occasion your money will be no good if your business becomes a hot potatoe issue.
-- John Swinton, 1883
There is very little integrity in a free paper, it's basically a propaganda leaflet handed out by large organizations to influence your behaviour, with a few crosswords in the back.
Bit of an over-simplification, I think. The Evening Standard was paid-for until a few years ago. It's now ad-funded. That doesn't _necessarily_ mean that the advertisers influence the editorial line: there are plenty of publications that get the majority of their income from advertising yet remain editorially independent (I edited one for six years).
The ES has historically been very editorially independent (generally not with an editorial line I like tbh, but that's by the by) and yet remained profitable. Now it's crossing the line towards ad-controlled. That's their decision, but I don't believe it was inevitable.
(That said, I think I'd prefer puff pieces about Google to the relentless crap about some guy called Nicky Haslam that the ES has historically run...)
This is also true of TV news. Last century, my cousin produced local tv news. They did a consumer report "lease or buy your next car" and the conclusion "buy". This did not sit will with the advertisers and my cousin was called into meetings.
Also this year the art non-profit I work for submitted a story to a free paper and it was published. It was more of a "here is an event thats happening", piece but still gives me a little pause.
Isn't that just a press release? When I was taught about press releases the idea was to make them as simple as possible for the person at the newspaper to cut and paste.
I know the person went back and forth with the paper's editor about how to improve the story. In some ways we were just providing free content.
Does it? The advertiser isn't the basis of the revenue stream - the ad space is. That space can be sold to someone else. The revenue will be lower, especially if the newspaper is struggling to find advertisers, but not necessarily by very much. If the advertiser has negotiated favourable rates for bulk purchasing then losing them could actually lead to selling that space for more money to a range of smaller advertisers if the supply of advertisers is greater than the newspaper can serve.
In some cases giving up editorial control to advertisers will drive some readers away, which contracts circulation and consequently lowers ad prices, leading to a similar reduction in revenue.
I don't think the economics of advertising, especially in print media, are very obvious. There's a lot of different forces that need to be kept in balance in order to maximise revenue. It isn't a simple case of keeping the advertisers happy to make the most money.
To maximise revenue you want clients to compete for your ad space (in some cases, just to be in there instead of their competitors). Editorial control just goes out of the window, so long as the baseline quality is high enough to keep people reading, you're good.
A more imminent concern is that, given the increased news frequency in the last one or two years, many stories don't make it to the home page, and don't get the coverage they deserve. Also, HN is somewhat prone to ring voting, and I guess this is almost impossible to get under control, though it's not too bad IMHO.
Both of these issues could be seen as inviting growth hacking or worse: the first one to shadow negative publicity (a trick as old as the soccer world championship); the second one, obviously, by making public reception appear in favour of something, when in reality it's everything but.
Ok there's one issue I'm having with HN: too many pieces about machine learning/big data, and stories being predictably offtopic'd by functional programming nerds (but it's par for the course on HN, ycombinator and all).
Besides, HN is not the product, nor is it primarily meant to market the YC backed companies I think. HN is a forum for the startup community and its primary function for YC I think is to be a channel to attract people to YC.
Exactly -- provable, heavy-handed suppression of criticism by the moderators would undermine this goal. Instead, the community itself exerts a drag on direct criticism of YC and its companies by giving it less attention than other material. (With some notable exceptions.) And that's fine -- I can and do find such material on other fora which have their own biases.
What does happen, in my opinion, is that negative comments get down voted into oblivion, which kind of makes sense.
The objective aspect is that they generally make for low quality conversations and the subjective aspect is that you're complaining about people's livelihood (the age old: "you can not rely on a person understanding something if their salary depends on them not understanding it").
> What does happen, in my opinion, is that negative comments get down voted into oblivion, which kind of makes sense.
"Downvoted into oblivion" would be precisely how I'd quietly moderate stuff I didn't want showing up on the site. Not saying it's happening, but "I don't think I've ever seen it" would be precisely the intended result.
If NPR suddenly started doing ranty right-wing commentary they'd be in the same financial difficulties as they'd be from losing a bunch of major advertisers/sponsors.
(Edited to add a side note: For a show called "No Agenda", "Curry theorizes that the Haiti earthquake was done on purpose by an earthquake machine so that Bill Clinton can build hotels on the northern shores of Haiti" sounds a bit agenda-y... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Agenda)
Example?
One suspects Starbucks' pitch was heavily oversold on the day, and starbucks rightly took fright and reported it to someone hence the article.
I am dubious there really is buying actual editorial coverage beyond what you get when you give a newspaper a million in advertising and the editor asks himself "do we really want to piss off a million dollar advertiser". That's not great obviously but it has been ever thus and until we find new news models it will be ever thus
If the Evening Standard wanted to change what it called itself to e.g. a 'hand-out' that may be ok, but if it is claiming to be a newspaper written by journalists then this is not. I am not a journalist, but don't journalism ethics include the concepts of truthfulness, accountability, openness and independence amongst others.
I do feel like there’s a lot of “gotcha” kind of writing in this article - their prerogative - but I can’t help wonder if it’s just a coordinated attempt to attack American businesses.
I also think there’s a presumption of goodwill for opendemocracy, and a presumption of ill will to the standard. What if things were completely opposite?
The reason I run this thought experiment - remember the last time you read a newspaper article about an area of industry you’re very familiar with, and how incorrect and wrong it was? Why would you trust the veracity of every other article instead?
One example: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/05/trump-childrens... now read this: https://www.wsj.com/articles/congress-leery-of-trumps-cuts-t...
http://gawker.com/here-are-some-top-n-y-times-editors-and-st...
and I will say more than it's a frat, a cult, a club. It has nothing to do with informing people; quite the opposite, they are a flock of mockingbirds.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/is-amazon-getting-to...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/04/27/h...
That seems to be a slightly disingenuous comparison. For one, Bezos seems to be taking a pretty light touch on Washington Post editorial content, which probably makes sense for him as an owner, since it's probably worth more as a business if it has a solid editorial reputation.
For two, if you're looking to cast aspersions on the editorial influence of owners, you'd maybe want to take a look at who owns the Evening Standard, since that's the paper whose coverage has apparently been put up for sale. It's Alexander Lebedev, billionaire Russian financial/aviation 'oligarch', who was literally a KGB spy in London in the cold war.
But sure, I bet you're right to be concerned about the sinister motivations of a bookseller now he owns a newspaper.
Definitely worth a read.
"Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler. Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that they want to. You can't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as you can in so many print publications-- which is one of the reasons, though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust bloggers more than Business Week...
Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese. It's people writing what they think."
There's also https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/
Or were they already a tabloid to begin with?