The decline of journalism and the rise of public relations

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/03/11/the-decline-of-journalism-and-the-rise-of-public-relations/

by samsolomon • 11 years ago

38 18 11 years ago

washingtonpost.com

malandrew• 11 years ago

I wish instead of a table, there was time series data of the numbers presented. I'm curious how much these values have changed and how quickly they've changed.

sitkack• 11 years ago

And are reporters switching into PR? What jobs are the news people leaving to?

ghaff2• 11 years ago

Some go into PR--both agency and in-house. My intuition is that's the most common case given that it's a fairly natural path. Where I work, we also have some in community management and various marketing roles. Some freelance, doing various types of jobs involving writing. I don't think you'll get those numbers from the BLS statistics though which are forecasting overall employment.

cs702• 11 years ago

The presented statistics are misleading, because they miss:(1) all the individuals who are neither paid journalists nor peddlers of PR but who nonetheless actively write thoughtful pieces on their subject of expertise, e.g., Scott Aaronson, the late Roger Ebert; and (2) all the new platforms and communities for publishing, sharing, discussing, and evaluating news that are hostile to PR and don't employ journalists, e.g., HN, many (but not all) subreddits.

UweSchmidt• 11 years ago

Reddit, HN etc. are an excellent platform for "peddlers of PR". Sure you need to write thoughtful pieces, and anyone can do that. But professionals do it better. They have the well-researched articles ready when a relevant story pops, and maybe a sockpuppet account or two for support. Or is there any PR agency left in 2015 who is confused about Reddit's hivemind and clueless about protecting their clients' interest on the internet?

gus_massa• 11 years ago

and maybe a sockpuppet account or two for support

If you use two or three sockpuppets that write empty comments like "Awesome, this is fantastic!!", the comments will almost sure be downvoted and that removes the support effect.

If you use four or five you'll probably get your own personalized message from the moderator asking to stop and banning the sockpuppets.

You may be more lucky using sockpuppets that say something useful for the discussion. Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/810/

austenallred2• 11 years ago

I've talked about this in a few HN threads, but it bears repeating.

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.

dredmorbius2• 11 years ago

Quite. "Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match"

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...

BTW, your droplr link is 404.

And ... Grasswire would be a _lot_ more compelling if it didn't throw up a registration roadblock.

austenallred2• 11 years ago

Thanks. Apparently droplr wants me to pay to use my archived screenshots. One more reason I'm glad I moved to monosnap.

And it's that way for a really good reason currently. Will be open soon.

cwyers• 11 years ago

What's interesting to me is that good journalism has always cost more than you could really charge for it. It used to be subsidized by advertising revenue and classifieds and whatnot. Part of it was a loss leader, but it's not like people in the pre-Internet age had better taste than we do. I suspect that one of the functions of good investigative journalism is prestige and a "halo effect," where having high quality content under your brand name helps make all your other content more desirable and reputable by association. I think more Internet publications may engage in "loss leader" prestige content over time.

ilamont• 11 years ago

Former tech journalist here.

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.

TheCowboy• 11 years ago

There has been another narrative that "citizen journalists" would either disrupt the industry, or replace the roles of journalists whose industry had been disrupted. This has come with mixed results for everyday journalism. In the case of investigative journalism, it just doesn't seem to be happening.

This level of depth in journalism requires time and skill. The choice seems to either work a full time job to supplement this hobby and having zero time for other things in life, or living without financial security. There is the other risk that this type of journalism tends to create enemies which can hurt job security. It can also hurt your career if you are seen as someone who isn't able to keep a secret. Individuals also expose themselves to the risks of libel and slander lawsuits.

Most people who can pull off journalism like this are usually going to be capable of pursuing a dozen other more lucrative and less stressful careers.

ghaff2• 11 years ago

In the case of investigative journalism, it just doesn't seem to be happening.

And what's covered is very uneven. Apple burps. The same (often thinly or non-existently sourced) story will appear in thousands of places.

On the other hand, the largely rural town that I live in only has a newspaper to the degree that something is of sufficient note to make it into the chain local news operation of an adjacent larger town. We actually had a good local newspaper for a while that was basically a labor of love but the publisher became ill and it shut down. But now no one consistently covers town hall, board of selectman, etc. meetings.

anigbrowl• 11 years ago

There has been another narrative that "citizen journalists" would either disrupt the industry, or replace the roles of journalists whose industry had been disrupted.

Yeah, I think the results are in on that one. It turns out that the people who are most motivated to work for peanuts to establish 'the truth' are often also the most partisan on any given issue and with the least commitment to journalistic neutrality. The websites that solicit content creation from the readership tend towards becoming echo chambers.

bane• 11 years ago

It used to be common to see "paid advertisement" inserts in major magazines. Sometimes going on for a dozen pages. It was clear they were PR pieces: typeset differently and with a different editorial style than the rest of the magazine. Sometime in the mid-2000s they simply seemed to go away and now the magazine just uses the PR pieces as content filler, completely indistinguishable from the rest of the periodical.

sparkzilla• 11 years ago

Most tech blogs appear to be Apple's PR arm

dredmorbius2• 11 years ago

10-15 years ago it was Microsoft.

Except the were called "columns" back then.

ch215• 11 years ago

I've worked in journalism and little worries me more than the growth of PR within police, government and other public bodies.

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-...

The decline of journalism and the rise of public relations

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