Would you accept product placement in a news story?
Echo readers were paid an indirect compliment this week. Two separate agencies contacted us about running advertising on our pages.
That seems to imply you’re a demographic worth courting.
But what does it mean to us? We’re a non-profit operation, but that doesn’t mean we’re not in need of revenue.
Every bit we can attract enables us to cast a broader net for news across the basin. Unrestricted revenue gives us greater freedom to pursue news.
The trade-off?
Well, one of these agencies offered to pay us $200 if we allowed them to insert a text link to an advertiser within a news story. The example they cited was the reference to “Virgin Atlantic” on this page.
This site is unlike Echo – it’s not a news site. And the journalist in me quickly rejected the notion. “If I understand correctly, it would require us to make editorial decisions based on whether we could shoehorn your client into our story,” I wrote back. “We prefer our editorial decisions to be driven by the journalism.”
Their reply: “Our copywriters are highly experienced in this genre of marketing so will be sympathetic to your existing content at all times. If the copy we provide is not to your liking you can suggest alternate text provided the anchor text remains the same.”
It all seems a bit duplicitous. And yet…maybe I need to get off my high horse. Is this worse than product placement in the movies? Sure, movies are fiction and we’re in the reality business. But I have to admit I did a little fantasizing of how much more journalism we could produce with a sufficient number of $200 text links.
What do you think?
Is this a flawed way of supporting journalism? And even if it is less than pure, is it an acceptable trade-off if it is a piece of the equation that supports quality news reporting?
Can we be too pure during this unsettling time of evolution of news reporting and the mechanisms to support it?
Great Lakes Echo Editor David Poulson is the associate director of Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism.
I think ads that are distinct from copy are accepted as a standard way of funding journalism. When the ads enter the copy, I start to feel a little apprehension. I agree with your decision.
There is a part of me that wonders if you could paid to link Dow to Dioxin stories, Bayer to Atrazine and Virgin airlines to the carbon footprint of flying though.
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Keep the stories clean. Adding a link in the story implies the article embraces the link and I think that is wrong.
Think you made the right decision
Thanks
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That’s a tough one. To me, I wouldn’t want to see advertising WITHIN a story, especially when it is NOT LABELED as a paid advertisement. I am not against your site having relevant advertising, per se, so long as it is clear that it is paid advertising. For example, when doing a Google search, paid advertisements popup as a sidebar, or are highlighted at the top. Would sidebar advertisements work? Maybe a special section in the sidebar? I’m sure that wouldn’t be as preferable to the companies involved, but paid advertisements should be clearly distinguished from general informational links. (Perhaps there’s a way to keep user-friendly links in a story, with proper notice, but that would require much more thought.) Regardless, there still is a real concern that advertising will impact how a story is written, even in very subtle, perhaps imperceptable, ways.
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I don’t think that links within the news story are appropriate, they detract from understanding the point of the story. If there were, say, three links within a story, and if the reader followed each, the length of the example, the meaning of the news story would be lost. A sidebar of ads appropriate to the intent of this site would be acceptable. One could instantly scan them and then move to the meat of the article. I would recommend you summarily dismiss an offer from, say, Nestle’s, for example.
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I find the advertising links on drugs.com, and I find them irritating. It’s not clear who does the writing of the articles – the drug reps, or an online journalist! I prefer that you keep ECHO pure, because I know I can trust what I read here. Thanks for asking!
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It‘s an interesting question. I‘d pass if the advertiser supplied the copy to go around the link and then demand the copy be somehow inserted in the story.
But what if the content stays as the writer wrote it and the advertiser buys the insertion of the link to a company already mentioned in the article? Having that link is obviously important for the company mentioned in the story – for SEO purposes, etc.
It seems most news outlets are already linking to company names, reports, and other sources within stories – and they’re doing for free what amounts to a paid placement link. (Has the industry again shot itself in the foot by giving away something for free online?) But then again, it presents a timing issue. When does sales know who‘s mentioned in a story? When would the link get added? What if a critic of the company in question wanted to link the company name to a critical site? And so on.
Good discussion.
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Little reason to wonder at the seeming illiteracy of people about such important issues as conservation. Even many of our newspapers are mixing real news with propaganda written by payed columnists. I hope to continue to get FACTUAL information from GLE. Thank you.
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Its a slippery slope. For journalism these days any source of revenue is hard to pass up. But I would rather see advertisement at the top of the page or a sidebar with them, rather than in the story. A link in the story makes me believe it is linking to a related story or issue covered by the site or another news outlet and not to a product.
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Let’s not.
Here’s why: Great Lakes Echo, by virtue of its journalistic nature, approach and content, has a contract with readers. Placements of this nature would violate that contract and erode credibility, trust and audience.
The journalistic contract says that content is created independently, without outside influence, to inform the public. Inserting content or links because someone paid for them to be there breaks the contract. To do that without telling anyone is a second breach of trust. It would be dishonest, given that the Echo is set up to be a vehicle for journalism.
We DO need to find funding for good journalism, and universities should lead the way. But if we toss out ethics to fund journalism, we destroy the journalism.
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It has nothing to do with purity. It has to do with transparency. Best practices are that advertising should be separated from news-editorial and advertising should be marked as such.
Some readers are not sophisticated enough to tell that the link can be the digital version of separating an ad from text. The confusion exists because links can also be citations and referrals.
Offer to set up a separate statement/ad on the page with the link but do not put the link in the text. Credibility should not be endangered for revenue.
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On Absolute Michigan we get requests like this almost daily. I think it’s clear that no publication include text links if the link isn’t germane to the story.
I think that sponsorship and even product placement can be used if it’s clearly stated that the placement is being paid for. It’s a stretch in cases where there’s no relevance though. I also think that as a hard news organization, the Echo has a much higher bar. Seems like the sponsorship model a la public radio would be the right fit.
FYI, this link-buying is all part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns where companies are trying to game better results for very targeted searches from Google and others. With the Google Traffic Estimator you can get an idea of what kind of traffic searches get and how many people are trying to buy ads for the search.
https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
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Any embedded link is aggravating on two accounts – the color change interrupts the flow of reading; and if you happen to have the mouse cursor randomly fall on the link you get an unexpected pop-up. Embedded hotlinks should be limited and should only be used for very important references; otherwise reference links should be at the end of the article (e.g., “for further reading”). To have the links tied to an advertiser implies that the work has been vetted by someone with questionable motives and compromises journalistic independence.
Advertising should be limited to the sidebar. On the other hand, we should take note that your work is being supported by the advertisers and we should, at least, consider their products.
-Tim-
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A few quick updates and reactions:
*Just got another offer to link a story that’s been a year into our archive. It would be from a word already existing in the copy, created in the “purity” of journalistic impulse. This is the kind of thing that Joe B. appears to be alluding to above. One option is to consider telling readers you will not link a story to an advertiser for six months after publication and not change the story to do so. Such a policy would mean the story was not constructed in a way influenced by an advertiser – the advertising deal came later. BUT…even if that’s the case, the concern is whether readers believe you when you tell them that’s the case. AND is the journalist either consciously or unconsciously writing with the advertising link potential six months hence in mind?
*Joe Grimm does an excellent job of articulating the journalist/reader contract. Maybe it’s time to renegotiate that contract. (I can hear the collective gasps from journalists everywhere.) How about telling readers that, yes, we’re going to insert advertising links? We’ll even color them differently to address Steve Lacy’s concern for transparency and to distinguish them from referral/contextual links. The other part of the new contract? Reporters get to feed their families.
*Some readers appear to be under the belief that we link only to information with which we agree. That’s not the case. We link to information that further explains – or at least backs up – the point that is linked. That doesn’t mean we agree with it.
*Matthew is right. It is a slippery slope. The question is whether you can ever justify moving down that slope just a little and with sufficient transparency so readers know what’s going on. Or does a step down that slope result in an inevitable destruction of the journalism?
And, is a flawed journalism – or even one that is perceived to be flawed – preferable to no journalism?
All that said, let me assure Echo readers that we have no plans to change that reader/journalist contract regarding linking strategy within news stories. If such a thing ever came to pass, it would have to happen in a way that you knew what was going on.
It’s helpful to hear your views. Thanks for the advice.
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EXXON/MOBILE and DOW Chemical would be happy to put in a cheap add. They would use you to have it documented, and say they supported environmental journalism, fair and balance, of course.
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Do it, Dave. Great idea about changing the color of the hyperlinks to indicate a paid link. Journalism has and is continuing to change. We need you to stay in business, and if that means a few paid hyperlinks (or more), so be it.
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Interesting post and view, hope to hear more what the future holds THANKS Great post. Probably saved thousands of hours between everybody here. For me,this clearly is a heads up on which methods to focus on to maximise my online success . I
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