Here lies Web journalism, dead at the hand of the almighty advertiser

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a hullabaloo over online ads masquerading as editorial on the Web these days. I’m here to tell you that the situation is actually much worse than you might think.

Though this has been an issue for a while, the discussion over sponsored content (also known as “native advertising” or “content marketing”) really started to heat up a couple months ago after the Atlantic published a “sponsor content” article lauding the Church of Scientology and its Hubbard-wannabe in chief, David Miscavige.

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The screams came from every direction. How could the Atlantic, a bastion of East Coast intellectualism for more than 150 years, stoop so low? Perhaps more important, why did it allow the CoS to control the dialog afterward, deleting all negative comments?

Following the hubbub, the Atlantic removed the story and apologized for “screwing up.” But make no mistake, this was hardly an isolated incident. It’s more like the future of media as we know it.

This morning an email promoting a seminar on “online content marketing” landed in my inbox. It quotes Andrew Hannelly, VP of digital experience for custom publishers McMurry/TMG, thusly:

Publishers are now finally wising up to the value of content marketing for their advertising groups. They aren’t just going to their clients and saying they have a great magazine or website and offering a banner ad, they’re saying, “We’ve got a great, engaged audience — why don’t you create some content that engages with them?” The subtext is that people are ignoring advertising, but they’re not ignoring content. For advertisers to really get in front of an audience, they should buy into the content stream.

FYI, “content stream” is marketing speak for “news stories.”

BuzzFeed and Forbes are the ones we know about

Or take BuzzFeed, which churns out traffic-magnet “listicles” the way McDonalds churns out Quarter Pounders. It has its own creative team pumping out content on behalf of advertisers like Sony, Dell, and Virgin Mobile that looks identical to other BuzzFeed stories (save for the words “BuzzFeed Partner” in small type near the top). You know what? They’re actually pretty good.

Or Forbes, which has fully embraced the concept of putting paid shills right next to actual journalists to see if anyone can tell the difference. (That’s not how Forbes’ Chief Product Officer Lewis DVorkin would put it, most likely.)

At least the ads on the Atlantic and BuzzFeed are labeled. More and more paid-for-placement content is not. And it’s happening at some of the biggest sites on the Net.

Just yesterday, I talked to a charming young woman who runs a content marketing agency. Among other things, she hires people to ghostwrite blog posts on behalf of advertisers, then place them on blogs — often, very well-known, highly trafficked blogs like the Huffington Post.

Do the editors at these sites know that an advertiser paid that blogger to write it? Quite often they do not, she says, nor do they bother to ask. Because the appetite for new material on the Internet is infinite — and readers’ attention spans are infinitesimal — publishers are happy to get any free content they can get their hands on.

Taking dictation for dictators

When they discover that the stories they were happy to publish for free turn out to be ads, sites with some remaining shred of ethics usually remove them. Last month, for example, HuffPo deleted a series of posts lauding the dictatorial Malaysian government paid for by — surprise — a PR firm working for the Malaysian government. The posts that my ghostwriting friend managed to place? As far as we know, they’re still up there.

This is don’t ask, don’t tell — the publishing version.

In the old pre-Web days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and publishing almost always involved dead trees, there was a treasured concept known as “separation of church and state.” In this context, the state was the business side of a publication — which is to say, ad sales and circulation. They collected the money and dispersed it; they ruled the budget process. Church in this metaphor was editorial, because we are holier than thou.

The idea behind this was to prevent advertisers from influencing coverage. By separating state apparatchiks from the high priests, publications would not be forced to cover products or companies simply because they spent beaucoup bucks on print ads, and editors would be free to say negative things about companies that were already advertisers (though in the most careful way possible — they were paying our salaries, after all). There were many uneasy moments and difficult compromises in that arrangement, but generally it worked pretty well.

That separation is disappearing with extreme speed. There are a few brachiosaurs that still hew to this concept (I count InfoWorld among them), but more and more Web publications have merged church and state in a variety of ways and under different euphemisms, whether it’s called “sponsored content,” “native advertising,” “online content marketing,” or nothing at all.

Is that an actual news story or an advertisement pretending to be one? Sometimes not even the editors of the publication know for sure. If that doesn’t worry you, it should.

Does it worry you? Or are you so cynical you don’t trust anything any more? Post your thoughts below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Here lies Web journalism, dead at the hand of the almighty advertiser,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.