The
FT's weekend supplement for 19-21 September features an article entitled
The invasion of corporate news by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson. The kicker* (one sentence; no full stop) reads:
The lines between journalism and PR are rapidly becoming blurred as business interests bypass traditional media to get their message across
The trend described may not yet be directly relevant to technical journalism (and the translation thereof), but it may be quite soon. The following quotes are particularly relevant (my bold):
Social media and digital publishing tools are allowing this
strain of corporate news to reach vast audiences, with profound implications
for the way businesses communicate with the public and for the media outlets
they are learning to sidestep.
...
PRs are
spinners of favourable stories, glossers-over of unfavourable facts and
gatekeepers standing between us and the people we want to get to.
...
But as
journalists bemoan such PR obstacles, they rarely admit an important fact: the
PRs are winning.
...
As
journalism schools pump out new generations of would-be Woodwards and
Bernsteins, many of those not finding newsroom jobs have turned instead to the
business of how to present the news in the most flattering light. They have
been joined by laid-off reporters, editors, producers and presenters, with the
skills to tell the stories brands want to be told about themselves.
...
Their
efforts seem to be working. Cardiff University researchers estimated in 2006
that 41 per cent of UK press articles were driven by PR, a phenomenon known as
“churnalism”. But PRs are now playing the news industry at its own game. They
are discovering how to work around journalists, getting their own slickly produced
stories, videos and graphics straight to their target audiences – often with
the help of the very news organisations they are subverting.
...
... with the
traditional press release came an “asset pack” that Microsoft PRs shot out to
century-old newsrooms and influential one-man blogs alike.
...
It was a
masterclass in PR spoonfeeding and news organisations simply had to drag and
drop.
...
The FT was
among those that embedded one of Microsoft’s videos in its reporting that week
(noting that it had been produced by the company), linked to and analysed
Nadella’s blog and used the company-issued photographs.
...
Sir Richard
Branson ... Virgin’s one-man brand has more than 1.5m Facebook likes, 4.4m
Twitter followers ... “Now we’ve got a way of reaching people who read what we say
and we don’t have to rely on the Daily Mail,” he observes.
...
CEOs are
finding that their unfiltered social media content is often picked up by the
traditional media it has circumvented, PR Week’s Barrett notes.
...
Marketers
talk about “paid media” (advertising they have to buy), “earned media” (from
press coverage to word-of-mouth buzz) and a growing category called “owned
media” (their websites, blogs and social media feeds).
...
This digital
spin on traditional advertorials has been dubbed “one of the great euphemisms
of our time” ...
Some
publishers have gone further, enthusiastically lending their editorial
expertise to help brands improve their content.
...
For PR
Week’s Barrett, this point is at the heart of the debate over whether “brand
journalism” counts as journalism.
* As regular readers will be aware, I often quote from the FT, one of my main sources of non-technical news. On 15 Setpember the paper ran a piece entitled New Look for Financial Times newspaper. It was only today however that I noticed that the 'kickers' (what the French call the chapô) no longer, as a rule, end with a full stop (US: period). I wonder why?
