Slashdot Mirror
Contributors To Prominent Publications Have Taken Payments in Exchange For Positive Coverage (theoutline.com)
Jon Christian, reporting for The Outline: Interviews with more than two dozen marketers, journalists, and others familiar with similar pay-for-play offers revealed a dubious corner of online publishing in which publicists blur traditional lines between advertising and public relations, quietly pay off journalists to promote their clients in articles that make no mention of the financial arrangement. People involved with the payoffs are extremely reluctant to discuss them, but four contributing writers to prominent publications including Mashable, Business Insider, and Entrepreneur told me they have personally accepted payments in exchange for weaving promotional references to brands into their work on those sites. Two of the writers acknowledged they have taken part in the scheme for years, on behalf of many brands. One of them, a contributor to Fast Company and other outlets who asked not to be identified by name, described how he had inserted references to a well-known startup that offers email marketing software into multiple online articles, in Fast Company and elsewhere, on behalf of a marketing agency he declined to name.
It drives me nuts that bloggers and small time accounts are required by the FCC to tag and make obvious their posts that include sponsored content, but the major media outlets have blatant advertising all over the place that isn't disclosed. If it's an ad, they need to start putting disclaimers on it. Any compensation be it free product or paid placement/reviews needs to be stated before and after the ad.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
... is cheaper than advertising.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Forbes just fired its science writer for having Monsanto ghost-write his pro-GMO articles for him. The scumbag is also a "researcher" at Stanford who has published scientific articles about how safe GMOs are.
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.c...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Are the words "bribe" and "corrupted" still in modern dictionaries?
#DeleteFacebook
ALMOST ALL PUBLICATIONS will take a well-crafted PR statement, make a few changes and publish it as a story.
FTFY. (Having spent years on both sides of the game.)
"There are lies, damned lies, and websites!"
I am shocked and appalled that these quality publications would behave this way. That is Uber irresponsible. Perhaps Facebook and Google can use their groundbreaking AI technologies to detect this kind of thing.
a solid public education system. I've long since learned to spot this stuff. But I _learned_ that. It took years and several hard working and very good teachers. You're always going to have this kind of stuff. Every couple of years a few of the more obvious ones get caught. What you need is a system that teaches people to catch it and respond accordingly. In other words, teaches critical thinking skills. Yes, they can be taught. If it doesn't come naturally it's hard to teach and takes years, but it can be done. And even if you're somebody who just 'gets it' naturally it's worth it to you to pay for the ones who it goes whooshing over their heads to get it to. You don't want an electorate that's easily manipulated.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
From the other side of this, as a startup founder, I get solicited weekly by media platforms interested in being paid to write a story or shoot a video focused on my company. Previously, I didn't see this as nefarious, but I am cheap, and generally waited until someone would write about us for free. I do pay a service to distribute press releases, which seems to be a very normal thing to do.
The big exception in pay-for-publication space for me is scientific publication. I am a scientist, my company does research as part of its business and publishes that research in the same way a university would. Every time I send an article (that I've written) to a scientific journal, I pay the journal a few thousand dollars to publish it, preferably open-access. This is simply the way that market works. The peer reviewed journal system, for all it's problems, is widely seen as more authoritative than the news media, despite requiring payment for review, editing, and formatting.
My point is simply that there are certain publishing routes that require you pay, and some that encourage payment for access, and there's no ethical problem there. It's hard, when you're not a journalist, to understand the difference between these paid media platforms and the media platforms that get offended when you ask how much the fee is.
If you think this practice is bad in "journalism', you really don't want to how enterprise researchers like Gartner work...
Sorry to burst your bubble, kiddo, but that's what GamerGate actually was. The people who stood to benefit most from the corruption were feminists and social justice warriors. They used that corruption to pressure journalists into discrediting and dismissing the people trying to unmask it. They also astroturfed the snot out of GamerGate in the negative direction.
You see, it's like Anonymous: there's no "leader" and no controls over who decides to put on a "#GamerGate" shirt, so anyone can claim to be "in GamerGate" just long enough to say some heinous shit for a screenshot and discredit it. SJW supporters gladly tweeted heinous shit similar to "I'll have this Pokemon code for [game consoles] and I'll give it to you if you tweet "The holocaust was fake #GamerGate" which desperate little kids who don't give a fuck gladly did. Oh look, now "#GamerGate is a bunch of Holocaust deniers, see, here's TONS of proof!"
The real problem is that so many people are so trusting of bullshitters and so short on critical thinking skills that they bought the SJW-media complex astroturfing and false flagging campaigns hook, line, and sinker, and encouraged others to do the same because they're clearly totes super knowledgeable about these issues and well-informed, you guys!
Don't blame other people for your own inability to brain. Here, have some videos on this subject by an actual game developer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Propaganda reads like propaganda, no matter how much money is pissed into making it read like not propaganda.
Here's a hint: people aren't as stupid as you think they are. They can generally tell when you're reporting as truth something they see with their own eyes is false, and vice-versa. That's why journalism gets no respect these days. Everything reads like propaganda and the only people who think it doesn't are the bubble-dwellers in NY, SF, and DC who write it and hand out almost exclusively with other people who write it. It would just be impolite to pull out a sharp object in that sort of company.
The sky confirmed to be blue. More at 11...
You know, the other day I was sitting in my La-Z-Boy recliner enjoying the lumbar heater while surfing the net on my high-performance MSI laptop. Just as I was cracking open a fresh Coke and salivating at the crisp 'fizzle' sound, I realized how much of the media I consume is filled with product placement.
Other than "Everything Trump Says"
This is nothing but product placement by another name. We laugh at Microsoft when we see them do it on TV shows. This is no different. People just have to learn to ignore such obvious attempts when they see them.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.