Teen Vogue published and then deleted an uncritical story about Facebook
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
That's the way submarine articles are written and the way a CMS works these days, no surprise to most of the people here I assume, but I still find it surprising that CMS vendors sell systems that have minimal friction required to publish something. You don't quite need an air-gapped multi-key cryptographically secure system, but a few checks by various parties that articles have been copy-edited, fact-checked, verified for browser support and accessibility, and approved by an editor would seem to alleviate a lot of embarrassing publication errors.
No this was a sponsored piece that somebody sold to Facebook. This happens all the time, but Facebook’s PR activities are now under scrutiny.
Mistake or not, FB leadership clearly cheer led it's publication, and then walked back and claimed they had no idea this was sponsored, and only in the last hour or so said it was a "mistake" to deny it was sponsored.
This is particularly ironic because there are likely rules against account sharing that Facebook PR does not in fact follow.
Simple story:
- ok we'll do a sponsored post in teen vogue - story is written up! - oh, looks like it’s out, time to post about it
There isn’t gross incompetence, at best it’s just a bit of a timing issue from the mistaken early publish.
I know you're making a different point and not defending her, but this type of thing irks me.
Which was fine if she did it personally but people used it was her pr team as an excuse to shut down drama.
She unblocked MKBHD after deleting/retweeting those tweets using an android phone this time.
I found it a bit weird how her fans and most people casually ignored it using the pr team theory. That just makes it worse.
Sure, I can believe it. Because facebook, and companies like them, routinely manage, via their PR departments, to get articles not different than that published without paying for it too. It's certainly the easiest way for a journalist/writer to write an article, from the press releases and interviews given to you by a company, provided on a silver platter. And there isn't a whole lot of money for articles beyond the easiest/cheapest way these days.
The division between "journalism" and "content farm" (write whatever you want that gets eyeballs, if you didn't lie about anything, that's plenty ethical!)... is increasingly a grey area.
Teen Vogue actually happens to be pretty responsible journalism that usually does better than that. But how or why would Sandberg keep track? I'm sure she knows that they got the article their PR department wanted, it literally does not matter to her whether they actually wrote a check with "for that article" in the memo line to make it formally 'sponsored content' or not.
On what basis do you say that?
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/12/te...
https://qz.com/866305/the-true-story-of-how-teen-vogue-got-m...
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/teen-vogues-evolution-high-f...
That primarily happened under former editor Elaine Welteroth; she left shortly after Condé Nast killed the print edition, and it's my impression that TV has been moving back toward a fashion focus -- although a glance at their web site shows that they're still doing political reporting and op-eds.
I think this is similar to the Sokal Squared[0] scandal, in that a tribe (in this case purveyors of progressivism) will judge some work unduly positively.
Put another way, Teen Vogue's notoriety at the time was less "wow, this is truly groundbreaking journalism", and more "wow! Teen Vogue usually writes about makeup, but now they've gone all serious, and they said Fuck Trump! And Fuck Trump indeed! Go Feminism!"
I would argue that given your evidently gross misinterpretation of my comment, it is now actually you who looks hysterical.
But you did "air quote" for satire.
In any case, I think the point in the context of TV publishing and unpublishing the Facebook fluff piece is that doing that sort of thing runs counter to the more recent perception of them as politically savvy enough to understand how publishing a PR-provided article like that might look to their audience in particular.
Well, first off, I doubt she wrote that FB post herself, and it's questionable if she even saw it before it went out. But even so, I'd easily believe that she thought the article was organic, not sponsored.
FB (like all other large companies, organisations, interest groups, etc.) pays a lot of money to a PR team to get content like this into publications, and it works quite well. PR flacks are constantly talking to journalists, offering info, trading favours, giving journalists access to insiders or the opportunity to do a photo shoot, and even providing "draft" articles that the journalist can use as a starting point.
These efforts succeed all the time; is it shocking that some FB execs may have believed they worked on Teen Vogue? (We're not exactly talking about the NYT here...)
From Sandberg's point of view, FB pays a lot of money to PR people to get fawning puff pieces into print, and here's a fawning puff piece in print. Why would she smell a rat?
What I want to know is, where did the communication breakdown happen? Who wrote that wording? Did everyone at FB believe they'd convinced Teen Vogue to run an organic puff piece? Was that intended to be a draft that the reporter was going to rewrite? Or was it always intended to be a sponsored post, Teen Vogue messed up by publishing it normally?
But they did, and when they did Facebook promptly crowed about it and pretended that this was journalism showing (pause for breath) Facebook's dedication to honest media coverage. And it was a paid advertisement the whole time.
That's... well, just ew. And none of that has anything to do with CMS features that made the mistake visible to the public.
They don't, they offer flexible workflow systems not unlike CI/CD pipelines. Customers just want simple and fast, so that's how they configure them.
"At some point, Teen Vogue contributor Lauren Rearick was listed as the author of the story. When reached for comment, Rearick told Mashable that she did not write the article.
"That isn’t my byline," she wrote over email. "I didn’t write this story.""
Maybe she'd decline and it would go up as sponsored/editorial content, maybe she'd soften it up a bit and write it as her own article, maybe (unlikely in this specific case, though it certainly happens in eg. trade journals) she'd sign off on the puff piece exactly as submitted. A representative from that PR firm would have called, met with, or wined and dined with her and offered it for any of the above options, perhaps with an incentive of an exclusive interview as a reward or just as a free piece of work for her to sell to TV.
I totally believe that Lauren didn't write it yet. She did write, for an example article, 'Kitsch X Justine Marjan Created a "Vote" Hair Clip' [1]. There's a significant chance that Kitsch or their PR firm contacted her and suggested that the clip might be something she's interested in writing about, perhaps including some sample copy. There's a chance she wrote that article entirely in a vaccuum, happening across an Instagram post, doing some research, making phone calls...but that's not the way most journalism happens today.
Mashable story tracking the takedown and statements by Teen Vogue: https://mashable.com/article/facebook-teen-vogue-sponsored-c...
Update: Sadly, it looks like the Internet Archive copy has now turned into a 404. Mods should probably replace this link with the Mashable writeup above instead.
Since Internet Archive chucked it in memory hole.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200108170304/https://www.teenv...
Assuming that the timestamps in the archive.org timeline are UTC:
2020-01-08 17:03:04 UTC capture with content
2020-01-08 18:02:12 UTC capture with "Uh-Oh ..."
2020-01-08 18:10:22 UTC capture with "Uh-Oh ..."
2020-01-08 18:10:25 UTC capture with "Uh-Oh ..."
2020-01-08 18:11:28 UTC capture with "Uh-Oh ..."
2020-01-08 ~22:40 UTC 17:03:04 capture present
2020-01-08 ~23:40 UTC 17:03:04 capture missing
2020-01-09 ~02:40 UTC 17:03:04 capture present
So arguably this must have been a manual intervention.
And again, no blame. It's just metadata.
Regardless, sponsored editorial content is one of those icky things that I'm surprised remotely reputable journalistic outlets get into. You're renting out your reputation to those that could use it (e.g. likely not very reputable themselves and thus can easily drag you down).
How much does an article like this go for? Six-figure range? It just seems like the monetary reward doesn't make up for the possible damage to your perceived journalistic integrity.
A reasonable CPC for native content is under 10 cents. Assuming a 5% CTR (high), that's 1k clicks, for ~$100.
A reasonable CPM is also under 10 cents. That comes in at ~$200.
News articles don't stay on the front page very long.
It's amazing and pathetic how willing companies are to throw their reputation into the ground for almost no money.
The point was, the OP guessed six figures. I was trying to make it clear that I can't imagine this being above the low four figures.
I can't imagine it would be that cheap.
These days, how can we even know?
Anywhere between $800 and $5,000. Most of these articles aren't written by the company paying the magazine, but rather the company hiring a firm to pay off one of the hundreds of people who has publishing access to the magazine's CMS.
this was a dumb move by vogue, but I hardly believe they were paid off for a few hundred dollars by a $500B company and ok with that.
No. This was a dumb move by Advance Publications, who owns Teen Vogue. If companies want the benefits of owning half the market, then let them share the stink of their corruption as well.
Putting the blame on a recognizable and valuable brand instead of a faceless parent company is the better way to get accountability. If you really want to spread the blame around, you can mention that it's the owner of Reddit and the parent company of Ars Technica, Wired and The New Yorker as well as Teen Vogue.
Teen Vogue readers don't want to buy a magazine from Maxim or Modern Hunter or whatever.
They don't. They may have been reputable before they do this sort of thing, but that reputation is toast once they sell out.
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-google-lies-2011-5
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/612424/facebook-is-being-...
That, at least, is my take.
Maybe I'm naive but the idea that Facebook (or whatever company) is "pitching possible stories" to news outlets seems bizarre to me.
If they have a public relations department, they are pitching stories like this.
Here is a general rule of thumb when reading an article. If what you are reading is not news, you are being marketed to.
A massive amount of news is produced this way because it is a result of a symbiotic relationship between journalists who have a constant need to produce content and powerful institutions who can produce a constant reliable firehose of such content.
”Of the stories you read in traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more than half probably come from PR firms.”
It may or may not be a sign of a financial relationship, but it's certainly underhanded behavior.
https://www.amazon.com/Crystallizing-Public-Opinion-Edward-B...
Did they let interns run the PR department for a day?
But yes, I've also heard it's a bunch of creepy older folks
While it's not exactly an unbiased source, Wikipedia trusts this citation enough...
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/teen-vogue-promot...
I'm remembering the Stanford study in 2016 that showed 4 out of 5 middle school students weren't able to distinguish sponsored content from the publication's own content.
Maybe an enterprising Teen Vogue marketer decided to push that number up to 5 out of 5.
https://ed.stanford.edu/news/stanford-researchers-find-stude...
Shouldn't Teen Vogue be about teenage fashion stuff? Isn't Facebook the 'old people' platform? Would real teens care?
Teen Vogue has been noted (quantitatively, and in some circles qualitatively as well) for its social and political coverage for several years. Yes, real teens care.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/12/te...
Just curious.