The media industry’s naughty little secret
November 25th, 2006
Leadership magazine’s fall from grace – with the revelation that you can buy an appearance on its front page – is one example of an increasingly common occurrence across our whole industry: the tendency to mislead readers about paid-for content.
It emerged in Parliament last week that the SABC had paid R123 000 to put their CEO Dali Mpofu on Leadership’s glossy cover. Appearing in this spot was once a coveted and honourable recognition of status and achievement. Now it has been debased and the magazine discredited, as it appears that it might go to the highest bidder.
It is a sad day when Leadership, once an influential publication, has fallen so low. But it is not alone in disguising paid-for material as advertising. Every day you can open newspapers and magazines which have features, supplements and surveys which are paid for – and this fact is either heavily disguised or completely hidden.
Some of my Wits colleagues – Lesley Cowling and Bate Felix, along with HSRC researcher Adrian Hadland – are about to publish a monograph which shows how widespread this phenomenon has become and makes it clear that readers are often not aware of the difference between editorial and this new kind of advertising-in-drag.
The Leadership example illustrates the danger. When you push it too far, you can damage the credibility of your product and lose far more in the long run than the income gained from a few adverts or features.
The pressure to do it is enormous, and cannot be lightly dismissed. For one thing, advertisers have become much more powerful because they have far more media choices. So they can insist that you do it, or they just take their business elsewhere.
This is what happened last week with Cell C’s new campaign. When Business Day balked at allowing Cell C to use their masthead on posters, thus giving readers the impression this was news rather than advertising, they took the business to the Mail & Guardian.
I am told that the editor of the Mail & Guardian did not know that her advertising department had sold her news posters. So it was not even that there was an ethical dilemma – it was an editorial decision (news posters have always been editorial space, written by editors) taken by advertising salespeople. (The M&G ombudsman criticized the decision and I understand that the paper has taken steps to ensure that such decisions are more carefully considered in future.)
Furthermore, television and new media is able to be much more flexible and to offer all sorts of other things (like product placement) to advertisers. So when newspapers try and make rules about these things, they are seen as fuddy-duddy and are in danger of losing even more revenue to other media sectors.
But, when people have lots of media choices to make, credibility is an all-important commodity for news and current affairs media. If the audience no longer trusts a publication’s editorial decisions, they can just go to one they trust more. Lose their trust and you lose audience, and it isn’t easy to win them back.
Sunday Time’s research, for example, has shown that their readership and sales have recovered in the last eight years or so in line with the growth in reader trust of the publication.
So the message is clear: a good publisher and good advertising manager realize that selling your soul to an advertiser is a short-term strategy which can have long term costs. A healthy publication is one which can balance the interests of readers and advertisers, or of the advertising and editorial department.
In recent years, a number of South African publications have lost this balance.
Entry Filed under: Anton Harber, Print, Journalism
4 Comments Add your own
1. Herman Lategan | November 27th, 2006 at 8:55 am
The rot coninues and does not stop with Leadership, once a fine publication under Hugh Murray. I know of journalists who act as PROs on the side and then push their clients in print. I have also seen PROs have their press releases published with their by-lines. Since when does a press release have the PRO’s by-line attached to it? And then there are those lazy journalists who print a press release verbatime…yes you guessed it…under their own by-line. But wait, it doen’t stop there. There is a well-known TV magazine programme that charges you a fat some to have your house featured on the propgramme. Sic transit gloria mundi.
2. Augustus Polile | November 28th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Due to increasing competition, publications have witnessed unprecedented decline in both circulation and advertising which have always been their life and blood. Therefore, it is logical that they will find any innovative way of generating revenue even if it is at the expense of their credibility. In this kind climate, clearly publications must make hard choices or else they are out the scene, remember these are businesses.
3. Herman Lategan | November 28th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Publications have dropped in circulation because newsrooms are understaffed, journalists are paid badly and quite frankly, most publications are run by stuffy accountants or ageing rugby players. Journalism is in a sorry state with the same banal stories popping up in different publications. Articles are badly written and badly researched. To say that editorial credibilty must be sacraficed because publications are in trouble is poppycock.
4. Trudie Blanckenberg | December 1st, 2006 at 11:19 am
Naughty? Why not call a spade a spade?
The excuse about economic survival is a fig leaf to cover the arrogance, greed and dishonesty of the media industry. And this has been going on for such a long time that it has become the new morality. If you have to survive at the expense of credibility you should not be part of the media scene.
Those in the know should speak out, not only for the sake of media freedom but also for the sake of the freedom of everybody else. Why don’t we see a list published of the clean ones, or will that result in no list at all? Media self-regulation has clearly failed.
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