The internal war that erupted this week at the Los Angeles Times broke down along all-too familiar lines. Publisher Eddy Hartenstein, defending his decision to run ads for an NBC show and an upcoming Paramount film that had been designed to look like news stories, claimed that harsh business realities had forced his hand. Hartenstein reportedly told an angry newsroom: "I'm just trying to keep the lights on here, folks." Journalists, both at the paper and at large, contended that the editorial integrity of the paper had been damaged. "It's unwise and ethically problematic to have advertising morph into news content and style," said Bob Steele, a journalism values scholar at the Poynter Institute.
Of course, talking about ethics and integrity and other high-minded concepts is a surefire way to make ad sales folks roll their eyes and dismiss you as a pointy-minded idealist. No, to sway publishing executives you have to convince them the line that's suffering real damage isn't the sacred (at least to editors) one between church and state, it's the one that's near and dear to their blessedly capitalistic hearts: the bottom line.
Some years ago I was working for a national monthly when I got a call from the magazine's publisher. She was livid over a profile I had assigned and edited in which an outspoken celebrity trashed a number of American corporations, most notably one of the Big Three automakers. After lecturing me on the nature of advertiser relations, she killed the piece. (At this media company, the publisher had the authority to do that.) Then to rationalize her decision, she hit me with this analogy:
"Pretend we're running a candy store," said the publisher, a hard-charging exec who had made her bones in ad sales. "We have to make sure we're giving our customers the best possible candy we can make. If they start getting bad treats, they're not going to come back to our store. I mean, would you?"
To her credit, her metaphor, though simplistic, pretty succinctly summed up her worldview of the industry. And over the years, I've come to realize that many in publishing see the business in the same terms. I'm sure Hartenstein saw the boundary-pushing ads in the Times as simply another way of giving the customer what they want.
But here's the problem with the analogy: Newspapers and magazines actually have two sets of customers, advertisers and readers, and the journalistic shopkeepers sell each client a distinctly different product. To the readers, they sell editorial content. To the advertisers, they sell readers. In other words, for the advertisers, the candy is the readership.
Again: For advertisers, the candy is the readership. NOT the editorial content. That is something publications create in order to build a loyal base of followers, which it can then deliver to an advertiser. So monkeying with a paper's bond with its audience in any way--as of last Friday, about 80 complaints had been registered with the Times over the ads--will ultimately lead to ad clients not getting what they want either. That's how you sour your candy.
Readers aren't stupid. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who actually thought that the NBC and Paramount ads were really reported pieces. Still, by intentionally blurring the line, the Times sent a clear signal that the next time around the deception may be subtler. Perhaps a negative reference to an advertiser will be edited out of a story. Or the mention of a product in a piece will be sponsored. All it takes is the perception by the readers that something hinky's at work behind the scenes. Because after all, as all those publishers and ad sales people will remind you, the customer's always right.
