The decline of journalism and the rise of public relations

From 2000-2002, after the first dot-com bubble burst, the industry experienced the first wave of mass layoffs. At that time, the newspaper and magazine sectors were still relatively strong and were able to absorb some displaced writers and editors, but some started to go over to the "dark side" (PR). At my company it was also possible for senior writers and editors to go into research, which was seen as a more respectable alternative career path than corporate PR.

There was a slight recovery from 2003-2004, but then an interesting thing started to happen: a steady trickle of slow-motion layoffs, consolidations, and other cost-cutting measures. The weaker pubs began to fail as demand for print advertising dried up, and events began to feel the heat too as new entrants muscled their way into the scene. In some cases, staff were shifted to growing online units, but overall there was a net loss of staff in editorial, ad operations, and events.

Starting around 2005 or so, I began to notice a curious thing: Many of the 30-something journalists in my organization were voluntarily moving to industry. Some started to work for PR agencies, but in many cases they moved to in-house marketing units of large tech companies -- Microsoft, CA, Bose, etc. Certainly the pay and benefits were attractive but my own sense was there didn't seem to be much of a future staying in journalism. Why keep a job which offers little chance to advance and could probably lead to layoffs in the near future?

People stopped using the term "the dark side" around that time. It's hard to make some ethical stand about the purity of the profession when people are getting laid off or taking a salary cut while serious journalism is being sacrificed for the sake of pageview-heavy slideshows and blogs.

Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, himself said PR is a just polite term for propaganda.

I've had news stories that were in the public interest spiked because of spin doctors meddling.

In the UK, central government alone employs more than 1,500 communications staff[1]. I think that's bad for democracy and a waste of public money.

I'm with Noam Chomsky who said: "Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."

[1] http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/central-government-has-nearly-...

A lot of hard-hitting journalism is disappearing rapidly, and for one reason: it costs more to produce than it brings in. Almost no one in this day and age has figured out how to produce investigative or interesting journalism without subsidizing it with charitable contributions, listicles or cat videos.

That causes a lot of things. Copy editors are largely a thing of the past, as is the vast majority of fact-checking (more on that later). But mostly it produces journalists whose value is produced on how many page views they can produce in return for their time. Journalists are measured in PV/h.

That means even if you are willing to produce Journalism (with a capital J), you'll be splitting that proverbial journalistic baby with the other 10 publications that are trying to do the same thing, writing about the same story. It's an unforgiving, cutthroat, penny-pinching world.

So you try to expedite it. You publish things fast and loose, you delve into clickbait, or, in this case, you take pitches from PR and publish them wholesale or with a few additions. You do whatever you can to stay alive, or you're fucked. If you hold your head high, you face the unfortunate probability that you'll go down in flames with your reputation intact. You end up like GigaOm with thousands of people bemoaning your fall, but still unable to pay back your debts.

We don't need to look any further for this than ISIS. Not only is ISIS controlling the whole world's talking points by carefully crafting what news they'll release, but they're spreading stories all the time that are completely bogus. But you publish it, because ISIS sells every damn time. Look, for example, at this story about ISIS crucifying one of its own members for corruption: http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/06/27/.... It all started with a tweet from a now-deleted Twitter account, because ISIS wanted to spread the idea of how intense they are and how strongly they fight their perceived evil. So they plant a story about how they crucified one of their own members. Every media organization knows that's free pageviews, so they report it.

Of course, you could look at the feature photo in that story, which constitutes most of the "tip" from the tweet, and you'd find that the entire story is BS. Do a reverse image search and you find the original source: It's a Danish Roman Catholic reenacting Christ's crucifixion in the Philippines. http://d.pr/i/183Sf. The story of the ISIS crucifixion was made up out of thin air, based on a photo that was easily discoverable (and in the AFP database), but now the lie is in every mainstream media publication I can think of, from CNN and The Telegraph to The Guardian and the New York Times. They didn't even have time for a reverse image search. And ISIS wins.

A lot of what my startup does is fact-check stuff that's going on in the media (it's a newsroom for the Internet - https://grasswire.com), and every media organization (and I mean every) from Al Arabiya and the New York Times to Newsweek to Rolling Stone and New York Magazine are quite frequently full of inaccuracies and intentional lies. They're chock full of PR, which is probably the lesser of two evils. Sometimes people catch these lies, a few people freak out for <24 hours, and we all forget about it.

In Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, Ryan Holiday talks about how easy it is to get lies to spread throughout the Internet, and thereby all of mainstream media. The premise is very simple. You find someone at the bottom of the press pyramid - the person responsible for putting out 4 or 5 articles a day so that his or her publication can get enough pageviews to stay alive. There's not a chance that person can do any sort of verification. You send them a "tip," get a few smaller blogs to write about it, and the snowball starts rolling.

I don't know what the solution is (I'm trying to find/create one), and I don't want to pretend like this has only happened since the Internet came into existence, but I find most people put way too much trust in the press machine we've created. I would like to think that somewhere there are independent reporters and people who are digging up stories, but I've come to realize that most stories aren't ever dug up - they're pitched.