Journalists are under siege today. In many countries around the world, journalists risk and sometimes lose their lives in the line of duty. Here at home, the threat isn’t violence against their person, but a failure of the business model that for decades supported them rather handsomely.
The number of full-time U.S. daily newspaper journalists has plunged to 36,700, according to the American Society of News Editors, down from around 55,000 before the 2008 economic downturn and the acceleration of an industry-wide print advertising and circulation decline.
This week we learned that advertising columnist at The New York Times, Stuart Elliott, agreed to take a generous buyout offer from “The Gray Lady” and bow out.
David Griner of Adweek wrote: “For those in the advertising world, Elliott’s departure might be the most stunning. He is widely considered the most influential advertising journalist in the U.S. and has guided the newspaper’s coverage of the ad industry for decades.”
With Lewis Lazare long gone from the Chicago Sun Times and now Elliott out, there are now zero reporters working the ad industry beat full time at a major newspaper in this country.
Meanwhile, reporters of all stripes struggle to make ends meet. See the following Tweet:
I have been asked by a fairly well-known publication to write 1500-word essay on labor exploitation for $50. Guess they want autobiography.
Given the marketplace reality for journalists today, the most shocking media news of the week is the massive walkout staged by editors at The New Republic.
According to Ad Age, the magazine has lost at least 55 people from its masthead — a mix of fulltime employees and contributing editors — since Thursday. TNR will not publish its next issue on Dec. 15.
In a memo to staff on Thursday, The New Republic CEO Guy Vidra, said the magazine was replacing its editor, moving its headquarters to New York from Washington D.C. and cutting the number of issues in half to 10 starting in 2015.
“We are re-imagining The New Republic as a vertically integrated digital media company,” Mr. Vidra said in his memo Thursday.
This, of course, caused the group of old school media elites at TNR to be utterly outraged. That their outrage would also cause them to terminate employment at a time when there is little opportunity to go elsewhere as a journalist is a testament to the strength of their beliefs, and to the deep distaste journalists have for Silicon Valley’s version of “new media.”
“I got so I simply gagged every time I sat before my desk to write an ad.” -Hart Crane
I smile when “real writers” criticize their time making advertising. There’s a nostalgic quality to the criticism that lessens its impact and renders it charming. What makes me gag is the media garbage train, which includes everything from “The Housewives of Your Stupid City” to the masquerade of cable news and the onslaught of verbal nonsense clogging up our social streams and RSS feeds. So, Crane and I agree that we have a major problem and that we don’t want to contribute to it.
But unlike Hart Crane, when I sit down to write an ad, I am invigorated, not nauseated. The making of an ad is my chance to make things known and make them right, by a small degree for sure, but right nonetheless. What do I mean by “making things right” in an ad? I mean telling the truth about the company, in new and surprising ways. The fact is there are tens of thousands American companies making great products and providing terrific services. These companies have lots of authentic stories to tell, because happy customers like to share their favorite brand experiences. These companies also have the opportunity to contribute to the culture, and many of them do.
Making advertising the right way takes belief in, and loyalty to, a different path, and a steep, lonely path it can be. There is a ton of advertising that continues to mask unhealthy corporate agendas. And there’s a ton of relatively innocent advertising that is poorly constructed, from strategy through to execution. Here’s the rub though, low standards industry-wide and decades of bad practices can be overcome, one ad at a time. It may sound like a quixotic pursuit, and perhaps it is. So be it—take me to your windmills.
Personally, I find ethics in media and in business a fascinating topic. Media is incredibly powerful, and the potential for misuse extraordinarily high. Media can contribute to the demise, or to the coming together, of people. That’s why, for better or worse, I’m in it to win it.
Pageview journalism is a method of presenting information online in a slideshow or other framework that garners as many clicks from a reader as possible. This is what it looks like:
Writing for The Guardian, Charlie Brooker lambastes the painful conformity of web-based media today, largely in response to the shortcomings of pageview journalism and the damage it does to a journalist’s ability to establish a narrative.
Newspapers used to be sombre dossiers issued each morning, bringing grave news from Crimea. Now they’re blizzards of electric confetti, bringing The Ten Gravest Crimean Developments You Simply Won’t Believe. The art of turning almost any article of interest into a step-by-step clickbait walkthrough has been perfected to the point where reading the internet feels increasingly like sitting on the bog in the 1980s reading a novelty book of showbiz facts that never fucking ends. This trend will only continue. In five years’ time, all news articles will consist of a single coloured icon you click repeatedly to make info-nuggets fly out, accompanied by musical notes, like a cross between Flappy Bird and Newsnight. Even a harrowing report on refugees fleeing a warzone will cynically draw you in by promising to show you a famous person’s bum after every 85th click. And it will succeed.
Media criticism, like this, delivered with a sharp bite is something to behold. The digital echo chamber is deafening. It takes a piercing voice to rise above it. Brooker has this going for him.
Of course, I agree with him that lowest common denominator page view journalism is a shitty development for readers, and makers of news. I’d extend this to advertisers, as well. For brands, the opportunity to serve people with valuable information and develop a customer relationship is in owned and social media. Paid and earned media continue to be important, but even the best online ads and editorial are competing with a thousand other possibly more interesting options, all of which are just a click away.
Media companies that peddle “step-by-step clickbait” believe digital media is not a reading experience, nearly as much as it is a self-guided navigation through text and images. New sites like Medium are beginning to counter this negative trend. Medium is a place for readers—that’s how the site is designed and it shows.
Alternatives like Medium provide one way to combat the “blizzards of electric confetti.” But pageview-driven techniques are not going away. Anything that can be monetized, will be, and right now advertisers and investors are propping up pageview journalism sites with buckets of cash. Henry Blodget told the Financial Times that Business Insider’s 2013 revenue would be “close to” $20 million. That’s a lot of money to work with every year. Nevertheless, media critic, Michael Wolff, puzzles over the math. He concludes, “The digital traffic world, with techniques and sources and results that are ever-more dubious, is, as I’d guess the astute Henry Blodget has ascertained, not a sound long-term play.”
Hard to say who is right, Wolff or Blodget. “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public,” H. L. Mencken suggested. Maybe clicking 30 times through an “article” satisfies people in ways I don’t understand. Perhpas I should not impose my desire to have people read long copy? By the way, this article is under 600 words, so I fully expect high rates of comprehension and retention.
I like to read about media enterprises that are thriving. It provides hope for the industry, and hope for me personally as a writer, editor and self-publisher.
According to The New York Times, Etienne Uzac, 30, and Johnathan Davis, 31, founders of IBT Media, are bringing Newsweek back to print. Each issue will cost $7.99.
“You would pay only if you don’t want to read anything on a backlit screen,” Mr. Uzac said. “It is a luxury product.”
What I find fascinating is how this company’s online media strategy paid dividends and paved the way for this print rebirth. The Times reports that IBT began using online metrics (across its 10 media brands) to help tailor coverage to what readers truly wanted.
Dry corporate-earnings articles larded with financial data, for example, were poorly read. But Mr. Davis discovered that readers landed on earnings pieces by searching for a company’s products. So IBT began to de-emphasize numbers in earnings stories while highlighting a company’s product pipeline.
There is a lot of chatter about big data and its various uses, but here is one example an applied use of data that proved both successful and desirable.
Nearly two months ago, I made the decision to stop adding new content to AdPulp.com. I wanted to starve the blog and my blogging habit in the process. In theory it ought to be easy to do, the starving of a blog. Just close the window on it. Shut down the machine. Look away.
I wish it were that simple, but it’s not, at least it’s not for me. AdPulp exists as a media brand now. Digital media is alive in a way printed media is not, and you don’t put something that’s alive in a drawer and call it good, The End. AdPulp is also alive in our readers’ minds, at least for now. Which begs the question: why step off in the first place? A writer courts an audience like a bee courts flowers, so there’s something unnatural here. Right?
Actually, the reasons for quitting the blog are pretty simple. From a return on investment perspective, ad blogging was a losing proposition. I also confused the marketplace that supports me, by presenting as both ad creator and ad critic. People prefer to hold one idea in their mind about you, not two. Given that making ads pays better than ad criticism, it was easy enough to decide where to focus my efforts.
Having said that, I continue to be an advertising critic and a journalist. Quitting a blog doesn’t change that. In fact, I am working on a new feature right now for The Content Strategist about the challenges of managing “brand voice” in multiple digital channels. In days of old, this article would have gone up on AdPulp.com. It would have been unedited and typically I would have spoken to no sources.
Timeframes for “real journalism” are also much different. A blog post is something you throw together in an hour, maybe two if it’s highly involved. A feature for a proper media entity takes many hours of work spread over several days, even weeks. Now my process looks like this: come up with an idea, pitch it to the editor, create a list of interview questions, find people to interview and schedule a time to talk, take copious notes during the interviews, transcribe the notes, prepare a draft, edit, submit, receive changes from the editor, make changes, re-submit, wait for approval and publication. A blogger would likely laugh at the archaic nature of this process. But I cherish the slow, deliberate, thoughtful approach.
Whatever happens with AdPulp—a sale, an inspired reinvention, or nothing at all—I now have valuable knowledge I didn’t have before. One of the loudest-and-clearest messages from this nine-year journey is build a business first, then add a blog. AdPulp was a blog before the business, a write-it-and-they-will-come dart into steady headwinds.
Contently, the publisher of The Content Strategist, is a good example of the business-first approach to making media today. Contently, the business, is a platform for connecting journalists with publishers and brands. The Content Strategist, on the other hand, is Contently’s media brand–its skin in the game. At the same time, the site is an “ad” for the platform. That’s how it’s done!
I learned about the existence of SCOTUSblog this morning. The site is read widely by those with an interest in Supreme Court cases, and this year won a prestigious Peabody Award for excellence in electronic media.
While the industry pub I co-founded lacks the Peabody, I can see a clear parallel between SCOTUSblog and AdPulp. Both are industry blogs put together by industry insiders, as opposed to a publication from a traditional media company. SCOTUSblog’s co-founder and publisher is Tom Goldstein. Goldstein is also a lawyer who specializes in arguing cases before the Supreme Court.
In October 2002, when he and his wife Amy launched the site, Goldstein saw it as a business development opportunity. “Turns out it was a really stupid idea,” Goldstein said in a C-SPAN interview. “People who need serious Supreme Court counsel don’t say, ‘Get me the guy with the website.’”
Three years in, having learned a lesson about media and marketing, SCOTUSblog realigned its purpose.
“We hired a real reporter, Lyle Denniston, who’s been covering the court for more than 50 years and we changed the mission completely,” said Goldstein. “We don’t write about our own cases at all, and we’re not allowed to talk about our own cases. We said we’re just turning this over to the public. It’s not intended to promote us in any way. It’s intended to be a public good.”
Shawn Hartley and I launched AdPulp.com one year after SCOTUSblog got its start. I can affirm Goldstein’s findings. A stand-alone industry blog is a poor vehicle for self-promotion. Like Goldstein, I figured it would be easy for AdPulp’s readers to connect the dots and say to themselves, “Hey, these guys really know what’s up — let’s hire them to make advertising for us.”
Because I am a MarCom pro, this lesson might have been easy for me to relearn. It was not. Ergo, I will repeat after myself…Complicate and/or confuse the marketplace at considerable risk to your earning power.
I nearly quit AdPulp several times in the past few years. I have always enjoyed the act of making the site, but the near term return on investment has been consistently disappointing. Like Goldstein wisely counsels, people who want an ad campaign do not turn to the guys with a website.
Goldstein smartly incorporated his learnings and went in a new direction. SCOTUSblog is now a viable media entity. I’d like to see AdPulp become a more viable media entity, as well. We started it as a business, not a hobby, but it has become more hobby than business over the years.
Perhaps, we too need a shift in focus? For nine years, we’ve been a site for ad grunts by ad grunts. But that’s a small, well-informed audience. Meanwhile, there’s a massive audience of relatively uninformed advertising lovers and haters that we might serve.
Digital disrupts all in its wake. Even our language is not safe.
Consider the word “content.” It’s a word I have adopted to clarify my professional specialty.
In April 2006, I was promoted from senior copywriter to content director at BFG Communications in Hilton Head. I was head of my own department, the content department, which set about filling vast digital spaces, a.k.a. our client’s websites, with content.
Given my history with and attachment to the word content, Tim Kreider’s opinion piece, “Slaves of the Internet, Unite!” got my attention when he turned his argument to what words mean and how they build or destroy real market value.
The first time I ever heard the word “content” used in its current context, I understood that all my artist friends and I — henceforth, “content providers” — were essentially extinct. This contemptuous coinage is predicated on the assumption that it’s the delivery system that matters, relegating what used to be called “art” — writing, music, film, photography, illustration — to the status of filler, stuff to stick between banner ads.
Most content, especially content made to sell, is in fact filler. Therefore, in the context of an advertising industry discussion, I am not grappling in the same way Kreider is with this problem. But he and I both agree that real writing must be called writing, not content. Same for real writers—they are writers not content producers or managers.
For me, this presents an important choose-your-words-wisely moment. Because content departments and content directors are not all that common, even today, so it’s not simple for me to easily convey my value to prospective buyers of David Burn-made content.
I was speaking to an old friend the other day. I thought how can my friend, or any friend help, me land new business when he or she doesn’t clearly understand what I do for a living?
“Hi, my name is David. I convey brand value.”
Sadly, especially for a writer, the above explanation and titles like copywriter or brand storyteller don’t do enough to communicate our market value. I am not sure there is much in the way of a workaround here.
I don’t want to over think this, but when you tell someone you are a writer, there’s an immediate suspicion (in gentler souls, a curiosity) about how you earn your way in the world. That’s likely why we come up with fancy words for what we do, or worse, long-winded explanations. It’s also why we work in fields like advertising and media.
When I make time for broadcast news, I am appalled. The product is increasingly unwatchable at a time when the need for insightful and brave analysis is at a premium.
I feel like a lot of people are shrugging their shoulders these days, and asking what the hell is wrong, and what can we do to fix it?
I had an interesting exchange about one thing that is wrong on Twitter today with writer, speaker and social media strategist Tara Hunt. She rightly noted how narcissism is a problem in brand communications.
.@davidburn Many brands are afflicted with a level of narcissism that any human would be committed for.
Clearly, one big brand with a toxic level of narcissism running through its icy veins is the Republican Party. David Frum, writing for The Daily Beast neatly identifies “self-reinforcing media” as one reason why.
Politicians sooner or later arrive at the point where they believe what they say. They have become prisoners of their own artificial reality, with no easy access to the larger truths outside.
Swap the word “politicians” for “brands” and you get the same results. That’s why it’s key to have people with an outside perspective in positions of power both inside and outside your organization. Of course, culturally we don’t want to reward the truth-to-power speaker, do we? We want to banish him and belittle him. But that is wrong. Instead, we need to celebrate and elevate the truth carriers in our midst.
My hero of all artisan heroes, Frank Lloyd Wright, faced banishment and several personal and professional hardships in his day. But do you know what Wright’s personal motto was? Truth against the world. His contentiousness is right there on the surface. Along with his righteousness.
Wright was a difficult man, a complex man. He was also a genius who remade architecture, and he did some of his best work in his 80s. In fact, Wright was 76 when he landed the Guggenheim Museum commission, a project which occupied his next 16 years. Wright died a short time before the museum’s opening in 1959.
Wright was a man of faith and conviction, and you have to be to fight the rising tide of shit. There’s no question we are drowning in bullshit today. The noise is deafening. And our ability to concentrate is weakened. But it’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last. Let’s turn to Yeats and his astute poetic observations in 1919, as Europe emerged from WWI.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The worst are full of passionate intensity. Interesting how a century does nothing to dent the fundamental nature of things — fundamentalists are terribly offensive blowhards who lack the substance their own ideas. It’s enough to make “the best lack all conviction.”
The thing is, the best don’t give up easily. Wright did not give up. Ever. He had an abiding faith, in nature, truth and beauty. I think President Obama has this same abiding faith. I have been disappointed by some of his more conciliatory and conservative moves, yet I am continually amazed at his resolve. Obama is more than a good man, he is a good leader. U.S. Citizens may not realize, and may never realize, just how fortunate we are to have a man of his intelligence, grace and patience in the White House today.
The segment provides an instructive look at modern media, and the audience for bite-sized pieces of news and entertainment.
I do not always like the BuzzFeed product, but I like the bold way Steinberg talks about his media company.
“For us, Facebook and Twitter, that’s the new network, that’s the new cable system. And we’ve mastered a way to create and optimize content on social,” claims Steinberg.
For revenue, Buzz Feed famously shuns the ad banner in favor of content-driven social advertising. “People only share things that they’re proud of, that make them look good. Things they want to stand for. So it’s the same thing with the advertising content,” he explains.
Steinberg says, “We look in 15-minute increments and our system gives more promotion to things that are being shared. It has to be shared to get additional promotion. That’s a really high standard.”
I’m interested in media literacy and brand authenticity and corporate accountability; therefore, I enjoy seeing media critics take a running stab at Advertising and PR’s heart.
To read the trade literature of the PR and online advertising industries is to be hit by a tidal wave of guff about authenticity, engagement and two-way conversations. In the “era of participatory public relations”, the story goes, “the people have defeated the corporation”. The objective now is to “make your customers a partner in the selling process”. This is pseudo-egalitarian code for the voluntary circulation of Facebook ads. The notion that propaganda is always a state-run, top-down affair provides a cloak for our complicity. Social media’s veneer of openness and people-power exemplifies western propaganda’s habit of masquerading as its opposite.
I think Glaser is right to question the veracity of marketers’ claims, but wrong to call what marketers are producing on behalf of brands is propaganda.
“Propaganda is obvious, crude and naive, but it’s also subliminal, underhand and insidious,” she writes. I agree, which is why I know the work I do for clients, and have done in the past, is not propaganda. Not one of her six descriptors fit what I or my colleagues do for a living. Regardless, I do want to listen to this group of well educated Brits discuss the topic at length.
Honestly, Glaser’s thinking encourages me. She’s concerned about big companies with deep pockets getting away with lies. She’s also concerned about economic injustice. We share these concerns.
I know many people and media critics think Advertising and PR is a crock. I don’t. I think companies, big and small, need help connecting with their propects and customers. Thus, the real opportunity in marketing communications is not in telling brand fictions. The real opportunity is to find and then intelligently amplify brand truths.
