Beware the wolf?
I believe that Michael Meyer’s story (“Should journalism worry about content marketing?” November/December) is an accurate survey of the “brand journalism” landscape. I am a Columbia J-School grad who put in eight years at Forbes and now writes and edits GE Reports, GE’s online magazine. For us, success comes down to value and quality of information. Like any decent media outlet, you have to give readers something they find valuable in order to get them to start reading (and subscribe!). There are many good “brand” stories that deserve to be told. Why not tell them? Let readers decide if they are any good. They are a smart bunch.
Tomas Kellner
Comment on CJR.org
We live in a world of bombarded branding thanks to the internet and I do not believe there is any escape. I worked in the last century for several publications that started as journalistic adventures but have evolved sadly into content branding operations. The pisser is that they are flourishing today!
You can change the content, but you can’t change the fact that friggin everything is a hustle (read: branding operation) in this new lost world.
The end of it is likely when we either all are treading water or are zombiefied from WWIII fallout.. . . . Well, there’s always football to take our minds off of the much bigger hustles . . .
Larry Evans
Comment on CJR.org
Very disappointing to see a piece in CJR so blithely accept and apparently justify the unwholesome fact that “boundaries between editorial and advertising in journalism newsrooms aren’t what they used to be.” Maybe you need that pivot in an article that glorifies a private company’s PR efforts, but this line of reasoning is barely above the schoolroom excuse, “He did it first”–as if that makes it all okay.
C’mon, guys, get a grip. I know CJR wants to be relevant in the fast-changing media landscape, but throwing bedrock journalistic principles under the bus is not the way to do it.
Most sincerely,
Mark Hertsgaard
Comment on CJR.org
I wouldn’t say CJR is accepting and justifying the blurred line between church and state; it’s merely explaining how media outlets get paid.
Bedrock journalistic principles aren’t being thrown under the bus. More like they’re being appropriated by the very companies who pay to have their ads or content published in magazine, newspaper, TV, whatever: Journalistic principles are being dangled by puppet strings–Mike Meyer here is trying to get you, the media consumer, to recognize who might be the puppet master. Frankly, I think it would be naive for CJR not to publish such a story. Good on Mr. Meyer for mapping how far the tentacles of corporate interests reach into editorial.
I used to think of myself as a journalist, until I started working at a trade magazine publisher where this flavor of content marketing is what keeps the lights on. I’d be alarmed if CJR didn’t cover this as in depth as this piece.
Nick Wright
Comment on CJR.org
Information inequality
“Vice Media has asked editors to assess any possible adverse impact on advertisers.” (“Who cares who’s a journalist?” November/December) Yep, that sounds like a vice. Or is that vise?
Corporations can do what they want in terms of content marketing, but at some point, the journalism profession/industry will have to define, and yes, promote itself as being a fair, objective, comprehensive news source. A reporter is not just another hired gun or mouthpiece.
There’s room for everyone, but not all information is equal and it’s up to journalists, not just readers and advertisers, to make that value judgment.
Sharon Geltner
Comment on CJR.org
Covering the untidy
Photographer Tyler Hicks and writer Jared Malsin are fortunate that they did not have to cover World War II if their experiences and comments on the tragic death from an errant shell of four young Palestinian boys reflect their acute sensitivities. (“Under the gun,” November/December). Their hearts might have bled to death. Of all of humankind’s many follies, war is the most untidy.
Google Coventry and London, England; Rotterdam, Holland; Dresden, Germany; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan; and countless other cities, towns, and villages that were virtually obliterated along with their men, women, and children, in some cases to intimidate the world just by showing that it could be done.
Their sympathy for the boys is well-placed but their bias in favor of the Palestinians overlooks the realities of a complex situation. Not even a passing mention of the Hamas guerillas raining poorly aimed rockets on Jewish settlements from firing emplacements near and inside civilian centers and United Nations offices.
“There are now [Gaza] kids eight years old, nine years old, who have lived through three wars,” the article concludes. There are Israelis now in their 60s, 70s, 80s who have never known anything but war from forces determined to obliterate the country and its citizens of all ages and genders.
Marvin Brown
Columbus, OH
WWII Army combat veteran
Between the lines
The November/December issue was a great read from front to back! I was especially pleased to see Lawrence Lanahan’s piece (“Ferguson before #Ferguson”) about the WYPR series, “The Lines Between Us.” As a Baltimore resident and WYPR addict, I listened to most of it. It was a great piece of radio journalism, worthy of the DuPont Award it received. The series generously cited the work of another Baltimorean, Antero Pietila, whose blockbuster book on bigotry and residential segregation, “Not in My Neighborhood,” explores discriminatory real estate practices that darkened the dreams of millions of Americans to own their own homes. Pietila, a 35-year reporter for The Baltimore Sun, worked 10 years on the book, which became a hit largely through “word of mouth” on Facebook. It was assigned reading for the Baltimore County school board, of which I am a member.
On a sour note, the cover story, “The wolf at the door,” about content marketing, was a fascinating piece, but “as it’s name . . . suggests” (p. 24) and “who I had previously seen playing with her dog” (p. 28) grated like nails on a blackboard. I hope CJR hasn’t cut back on copy editors. So many newspapers, The Baltimore Sun included, have done so.
Mike Bowler
Baltimore, MD
Judge the author by his book
Excellent review (“Pundit, heal thyself,” November/December) on a book by someone who’s disappointed time and again with [Chuck Todd’s] “balanced” reporting. He’s bought into the Beltway shtick.
Craig Hattersley
Comment on CJR.org
Perspective! Remember that Todd is a media “celebrity” in this new age of corporate journalism. Celebrity has its own rewards and sustaining the flow is paramount to most participants in that game. Why does Chuck Todd participate in the “journalism for fun and profit” game? Because that’s where the money is. Fourth Estate? More like Fifth Column.
Jack
Comment on CJR.org
Correction
In “Pundit, heal thyself,” from the November/December issue, we incorrectly referred to Barack Obama as the 43rd president of the United States. He is the 44th president.
Note from online stories:
As reporters we’ve all been there (“What happened at Rolling Stone was not Jackie’s fault,” December 2014). You get a great tip that on its face seems like a blockbuster story. You do some interviews, you write your lede. Then you begin getting the other side of the story and your blockbuster tip begins to unravel. Then you find out the “tipster” has shopped the same “blockbuster” to 10 other reporters who all did some legwork and found out it was false. Blockbuster dead.
The problem comes when you are so convinced you have a great story that you don’t do the requisite legwork to determine its validity. It sounds like that’s what happened here. Erdely seems to have been so happy with her scoop she didn’t want to let the facts spoil it.
We’ve all also been in a position where we’re asked for some reason not to get another side of the story. The answer to this is simple: Either I get the other side or I don’t do the story.
This reporter showed a massive amount of negligence in her reporting and has damaged a clearly troubled young woman–not to mention victims and their advocates across the country–in the process. There’s a reason we’re trained to be skeptical: Because there are always two sides to the story and there are always gray areas. Hopefully the next time this woman is commissioned to write a story, her work is viewed with the same skepticism she should have showed when listening to Jackie.
Former reporter
Well, it depends. I worked in a cross section of journalism and children’s media relations for several years. I wrote primarily for the Web. “Plagiarism”? What’s that? (“Journalism has a plagiarism problem. But it’s not the one you’d expect,” November 2014).
If you bounce between realms of consumer interest (e.g., finance regulation, poverty research, TV ratings analysis, spending trends), you’ll eventually come to identify that there are different standards of citation and sourcing efficacy for daily reporting as well as for in-depth, longform commentary. The threshold for original ideas is not the same.
New-media reporting has evolved extraordinarily fast. Our definitions or assumptions for what qualifies as integrity-driven work, within the interests or domains swallowed by this drive, however, have not evolved as quickly.
A couple of other points. Ben Smith says that “[p]resenting someone else’s words as your own is such a basic form of dishonesty.” Well, to be frank, this is the 21st century; that’s not a precise definition of plagiarism or dishonesty so much as it is marketing and publicity. Massaging the context of a topic or debate such that the reader can derive specific insight from the discussion with the same (even if identically worded) facts isn’t dishonest writing, it’s clever writing. And depending on what consumer interest one serves/covers, it’s highly rewarded, clever writing.
Aaron B.
The Editors are the staffers of the Columbia Journalism Review.