
How brands secretly buy their way into Forbes, Fast Company, and HuffPost stories - coloneltcb
https://theoutline.com/post/2563/how-brands-secretly-buy-their-way-into-forbes-fast-company-and-huffpost-stories
======
BrandonMarc
Welcome to the news business. Even your local TV station receives its news
directly from businesses, who often send multiple versions of the script to
fit different time allotments. This is where "PR consultants" come into play -
highly paid networking people who have the inside-track to, say, Walt
Mossberg, and for a fee will happily send him your story and any related
materials in the hope he'll decide it's worthy of publishing in his brand.
Whether or not money makes its way to the news entity, and how that factors
into their decision of what to publish, is an open question ... I'll simply
point out there are economic incentives at play, and leave it at that.

Macro vision ... Americans get news and updates from two sources:

\- "news" entities like the paper, magazines, television news, and their
related websites

\- advertisements

Only in the latter is it obvious that the viewing audience is being sold a
product. In the former, it's absolutely still true, it's just less obvious.

~~~
Angostura
I've worked on both sides of this, in both PR and as a journalist. What you're
describing is perfectly ethical - as a PR I, of course would send journalists
specific pitches tailored to what I thought were their interests, and make
sure that they had all the material they needed to do minimal work.

As a journalist, I loved PRs who sent me interesting stories pitched at my
interests and publication. Yes please - send them in. That didn't mean that I
didn;t then do my job; speak to competitors, treat the pitch with a fair
degree of scepticism, etc.

What's being described in the article is quite different - deliberate
corruption of the editorial process.

~~~
Retric
You can tell yourself that, but it's completely unethical by the news
organization and thus unethical for the company to create the temptation in
the first place.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
When I worked in local news I received those pitches. How else do you think
news about local businesses gets to a newsroom? Do you think a producer is
calling every business in town every day saying hey, anything going on today?
This is really part of the broader problem: people don't understand how news
works, but are more than ready to hop aboard a choo choo train of tossing
around big words like "unethical."

The copy that a business would send us rarely made air. I know, because I was
often the person who rewrote it.

Example: At a talk radio station I worked at a number of years ago, we
received a press release from a person who was protesting John McCain's
policies in a very particular way. It was very positive, and spoke of his
mission, and blah blah blah. We had no clue who this guy was, but it tipped us
off to a great story; we didn't cover it in the news portion of our broadcast,
but the talking heads that evening had a very good time pointing out how
ridiculous it was.

This is how news works. PR helps a producer by bringing their attention to
something, because let's face it, omniscience is not a trait of local news
producers. The producer might help PR with a bit of coverage, or very likely
doesn't. (The fax machine at a local newsroom is hilarious to watch.) The
angle that gets covered is occasionally not what PR wants. This relationship
is push and pull.

~~~
Retric
There is nothing unethical about 'call me if you have news'.

However, having pre-written copy introduces vast amounts of bias by shifting
how people are thinking about an issue. Thus, you can't rewrite it without
first being influenced to think along similar lines. Now, one option is a
simple firewall that prevents the person writing the story from reading
original copy. More effort in the short term, but companies would have less
incentive to try and shape the news for free press.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
Your case rests on the assumption that journalists are incapable of objective
thought, when objectivity is a primary trait of journalists.

~~~
Retric
Nobody is completely objective, to suggest that is to believe propaganda over
reality which is again the opposite of objectivity.

PS: Really, pink elephants, now where you thinking about elephants or did I
suddenly change your thought process... It is possible to minimize bias, but
failing to take obvious steps suggests they are not even trying.

------
zeveb
I'm surprised no-one linked to pg calling it a dozen years ago:
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
bob_theslob646
+1

------
aphextron
I don't think this is any secret, and it's why I support outright banning
these types of sites from HN submissions. They never have anything remotely
unique or insightful, it's just dog piling on the controversy du jour, or
expounding some extremely simplistic, cliche take on a complex topic . It's no
coincidence that these are the worst offenders when it comes to paywalling and
punishing adblock users either. Their entire business model is predicated on
clickbait, so the actual content is secondary.

~~~
timthelion
How do you know which sites sell product placement? Are you %100 sure that
NYTimes does not? What about theoutline.com? Do you KNOW that they don't?

I happen to be familiar with the book publishing industry in my country, and I
know that many journalists will publish an article on a book written by a
publishing houses PR manager, just to save themselves the effort of writing an
article themselves. And these are the biggest newspapers in the country.

------
gnicholas
I've wondered about the spectrum of behaviors/relationships that exist in PR.
This article describes one end of the spectrum: straight-up pay for play. What
is the slightly-less-outrageous behavior? Do big PR firms take people out to
expensive lunches or get them floor seats at Knicks games (much like
salespeople woo potential clients)?

~~~
Bartweiss
A much cheaper solution: send reporters or newsdesks article 'helpers'.
Basically, provide a list of bullet points which can be trivially fleshed out
into a human-interest article, chosen and ordered to produce the story you
want.

If you have a synthetic diamond company or something (that's a fake example),
you don't really need to bribe your way into the headlines. You can just
provide a ready-made skeleton for an article about how lab diamonds are
indistinguishable from natural diamonds, and spice it up with some stats about
how they're a huge hit with millennials. You can even get your company into
the story by providing a juicy quote, which will of course be sourced as "Joe
Schmoe from LabDiamondsAreUs says..."

I've seen this operation happen from both ends, and it works eerily well.
Harried writers are grateful for content that's easily converted into
deadline-beating stories, and as long as the topic is relatively low-
consequence they don't feel much need to cross-reference or seek dissenting
voices.

~~~
abakker
I get these all the time from SV startup PR firms. "Story Idea: 5 innovative
new uses for Docker/Containers/Mongo" etc. it's one of the fastest ways to
ensure I never write about something.

~~~
gnicholas
So if a PR firm is working for Startup A and pitches a list that includes
Startup A-E, then you wouldn't write about any of them? Or can you tell in
advance who is paying the bill?

~~~
abakker
They way it goes is that the PR firm sends me a basically fully written story,
and offers to get me on the phone with one of their marketing folks to get a
quote.

Sometimes, it's just a press release, but with a bunch of prewritten social
shares for me.

Here's an example, anonymized. I got this 2 weeks ago -
[https://pastebin.com/xwjiUhwS](https://pastebin.com/xwjiUhwS)

Not egregious, in this case, but, pretty presumptive on the part of PR.

~~~
abakker
I guess, on reflection, the behavior that seems most frustrating is pitching
it as a "Story Idea". I would prefer to have had "An offer to speak with CEO
of XYZ". But, in fairness, as an analyst I have slightly different priorities
that the average journalist. (not saying they're better priorities, just
different)

------
tootie
This is known in the industry as an advertorial and they have been common for
a very long time. Especially in trade journalism.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertorial)

~~~
pavel_lishin
I've heard it referred to as "Native advertising", but Wikipedia tells me that
the two aren't necessarily the same.

~~~
stestagg
Wikipedia being demonstrably independent in this matter ...

~~~
lev99
Does Wikipedia accept money for advertisements?

------
jondubois
The worst part is that in order to avoid detection of their schemes, these
writers tend to stick to big VC-funded startups. Nobody ever got fired for
mentioning Uber, Lyft, Tesla, AirBnb in an article... This makes the economic
environment impossible for bootstrapped startups to compete in.

------
d--b
Thankfully, Hacker News has no business interest.

Wait...

------
LeoJiWoo
To all the people who say they knew it all along. Congrats.

I didn't, and seeing it presented like this is horrifying. It really begs the
questions do we even have a legitimate media, and not a mercenary media that
kneels to the highest bidder.

~~~
gaius
... and then is it really "the press" that the Founding Fathers envisaged, and
if not should it be protected by the First Amendment?

~~~
macintux
Stop. I'm not a believer in slippery slope arguments, but given the fact that
our president has chosen to do his best to undermine the media and by
extension the first amendment, I'm strongly disinclined to add fuel to that
fire.

The press has almost always been biased and truthy. Look at William Hearst.
But it's still critical to our republic.

------
throwaway613834
Wow:

> “To be fair I was in the wrong, but it really hurt to see that relationship
> come undone from an outside attack,” he said. “It was a huge setback and
> I've learnt my lesson.” Maybe the lesson was still setting in, though,
> because Chong then appeared to offer me a bribe of his own. “Is there any
> way we can set up a partnership together to distribute content?” he asked,
> in the same email. “Happy to explore remuneration.”

------
mikeleeorg
If this worries you, read, "Trust Me, I'm Lying" for more frightening insights
into the world of journalism:

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0074VTHH0/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0074VTHH0/)

~~~
LeoJiWoo
I bought the kindle version last night based on your link, and finished
reading it this morning. Its a real WTF wakeup call.

This quote really stuck out to me. "In the pay-per-page view model, every post
is a conflict of interest."

Really frightening stuff.

------
noncoml
Uber buying stories on slashdot a few years ago, which resulted in an Uber
promoting story every other day, was the reason I gave up on slashdot.

~~~
dredmorbius
Source?

------
eightysixfour
I would love to see a plugin that counted brand references in a writer’s
history to expose this kind of thing.

~~~
dredmorbius
More powerful yet: be able to generate a graph of brands and references, with
frequencies/weights assigned, so you can spot the shills.

E.g., what products does X write about, who else does, do they cover the
competition as well?

Being able to assess positive/negative coverage would be even better.

I have some thoughts in mind.

~~~
eightysixfour
I’m more of a product guy than a dev but if you ever start moving in that
direction, let me know. Happy to provide some thoughts.

------
chadlavi
That article page had a giant whiskey advertisement in the middle of it for
me. I think I'd probably prefer to read about a topic someone was paid to
write about than have intrusive ads I don't care about shown to me in the
middle of otherwise interesting content.

~~~
yann63
I hit back as soon as I saw the top of this add. There was more below? :-/

~~~
dredmorbius
I have that response to ads and the scumslop (Taboola / Outbrain) crud that
shows up on pages. I've got adblockers, and block the domains as well.

Was reading a story on how the media undermine itself with a bunch of
examples, and _even re-reading the article and knowing these are part of the
story_ , my response is to click to block, or assume that I've reached the end
of the article, when I see that stuff. It's just toxic.

Good piece though. Sean Blanda, "Medium, and The Reason You Can’t Stand the
News Anymore", Jan 2017:

[https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/medium-and-the-reason-you-
can...](https://medium.com/@SeanBlanda/medium-and-the-reason-you-cant-stand-
the-news-anymore-c98068fec3f8)

------
TrickyRick
Recommended reading on the topic: Trust Me I'm Lying - Confessions of a Media
Manipulator.

~~~
dredmorbius
Adam Curtis's _Century of the Self_ is another:

Entire programme (4h)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s)

Chunked:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEsPOt8MG7E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEsPOt8MG7E)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub2LB2MaGoM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub2LB2MaGoM)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VouaAz5mQAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VouaAz5mQAs)

------
hectorr1
I assume that this is how all news that isn't either an AP wire or
investigative deep dive works. The payment is just often in other forms
(continued access, future employment, influence, coveted invitations...)

Difference is that startups by definition often lack the influence, status,
and/or wherewithal to pay for coverage in anything other than cash.

------
CodeWriter23
Accepting cash for links?? That should be the Google Death Penalty for all of
them. But I doubt that's going to happen, these sites probably sell a lot of
ads for Google.

------
marysam
Check your sources. is the author marked as contributor? -> find their twitter
account and check the background. Most sites have open editorial, or blogs, or
contributor's section. More sites will have open editorial sections as the
journos are laid off each day. And again check the source.

~~~
Bartweiss
It's not a great fix, though, because less-blatant PR groups just send out
draft stories or note lists which can be easily converted into news stories.
So even professional, non-bribed journalists who need a quick piece will often
end up writing the obvious story based on someone else's script.

------
dredmorbius
The practice is old, but that doesn't mean it's not corrosive.

In the early 1990s, "fake news" referred to the practice of packaging up VNR
and AVR bundles, generally for local broadcast stations. These are Video and
Audio News Releases, which are fully produced, including fake reporters,
generally covering some corporate news. Sourcewatch has a good overview:

[https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Video_news_releases](https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Video_news_releases)

And several source articles:

[https://www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary](https://www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary)

[https://www.prwatch.org/fakenews2/execsummary](https://www.prwatch.org/fakenews2/execsummary)

Hamilton Holt's 1909 book, _Commercialism and Journalism_ , tells the story of
the incredible growth of the publishing industry, fueled by six factors, but
to which Holt (a publisher himself) credited advertising for virtually all of
it. And to which he had extreme and justified concerns. He quotes another
journalist:

 _There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for
keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should
allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-
four hours my occupation, like Othello 's, would be gone. The business of a
New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to
vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race
for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the
scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the
property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes._

[https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft](https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft)

This from a lecture series at the University of California, Berkeley, on the
Morals of Trade.

The (very long form) _New York Times_ piece on Harvey Weinstein's abuse, and
control, over Hollywood and the press, is another cautionary tale of power and
its capacity to manipulate (and suppress) information.

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/us/harvey-
wei...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/us/harvey-weinstein-
complicity.html)

------
WalterBright
Nothing new here. I noticed it with the computer magazines in the 80's, and
I'd be surprised if that wasn't a century old practice.

~~~
dredmorbius
And gangrene's been around as long as humans.

"Nothing new" doesn't mean "horrible practice".

~~~
dredmorbius
Erm, doesn't mean " _not_ a horrible practice".

------
pc2g4d
Disturbing, especially given the difficulty (almost impossibility) of
detection.

~~~
dboreham
Um...isn't this how pretty much all media works?

------
somethingabout
I'm not surprised, figured it was pretty common.

As an aside, there is a guy who is very popular on Medium. He made a course on
how to be a more successful writer. One of the 'benefits' of his VIP version
was that he would write an article about you and put it in Huffington Post or
other similarly rated publications.

------
jdiaz5513
Let's find an algorithm that can reliably detect this junk and turn it into a
browser extension.

------
rusk
To be honest, I didn't think this had been a "secret" for quite a while now
...

------
zbentley
This is really similar to the way lobbying works in government. Most lobbyists
aren't blackmailing or directly buying government officials (that happens, but
is often illegal and, when legal is wideley considered unethical, even among
other officials, at least in the USFG). Instead, they're educating them. A
typical, say, US senator doesn't have a staff that can be thoroughly expert on
every topic on which that senator might need to take a position. Those topics
aren't limited to things that might be affected by legislation; they also
include things that might be asked of the senator in a news conference, etc.
This is overwhelming, even for an extremely well-staffed office, and many
offices are quite minimally staffed in non-election years.

Enter lobbyists. Their pitch isn't that they're unbiased, or that they're
going to give the hypothetical official a huge kickback, future job, or secret
bag of cash under the table (this sometimes happens, which sucks, but is not
inherent to the practice). Rather, the pitch is that, while they are biased,
they will _inform_ the official about a topic they wouldn't otherwise know--or
even know they needed to know about! Consider an about-to-break scandal in a
weapons manufacturer that has been manufacturing malfunctioning guns, or some
other relatively obscure topic (e.g. something massively overshadowed in the
officially staffed military-research department by, say, headline items like
the F-35 fighter expenditures). A lobbyist for that weapons company visits an
official's office and gives them a rundown on how that company works, why its
practices are (supposedly) ethical, how the malfunctioning gun works, et
cetera. Now, whoever is listening to this pitch (and many/most lobbyists
aren't heard directly by the senator/official who runs an office) knows this
lobbyist's bias, but they also know that _this is valuable information_ ,
because the choice is between knowing nothing of an area and being, albeit
biasedly, prepared for upcoming press-ambush questions or similar. This can
also help direct in-staff research.

Now, is this harmful? It definitely can be. But just like the PR-provided
"journalism" discussed in this article, it may also be the only way that some
information, however biased, gets into print in the first place. Given that
most people don't (or don't have time/resources/ability to) do independent
primary-source research on anything that _might_ be newsworthy, I'm not
prepared to universally condemn this practice.

Aside: there are a few limited alternatives for USFG officials to get
information from. The Congressional Research Service can prepare briefs for
offices who don't have the staffs to research on their own, and there are many
other similar options, but you still have to know what to ask for information
_about_. Vested interests (lobbyists) are very good at filtering for relevance
. . . to their own interests, which is sometimes better than nothing.

There's also no reason constituents, or groups thereof, can't request an
appointment with an official's office to convey info, just like lobbyists.
Lobbyists are often given preferential treatment in such situations because
they're known to be useful and informative (though there are certainly plenty
of cases where they're given that treatment because they're offering kickbacks
and take advantage of corruption and/or greed on the part of the people
they're meeting with). Again, I'm not defending lobbying in all, or perhaps
even most of, its forms. But I do think that lobbying, or PR-provided news,
are not inherently unethical practices.

EDIT: so many typos.

------
gumby
Not really clear why this is a "surprise" unless that has been manufactured
for excitement purposes. The articles in any single-line publication are all
essentially ads.

Consider the travel, fashion and car sections of the newspaper: do you think
they are really funded by the paper? Back when I got a newspaper on mushed up
trees we always chucked those sections in the bin when fetching the Sunday
paper. The sport section is pretty much ads too.

So I assume that almost all the articles in "business" or "tech" are
essentially placed. Some sites wear their allegiance on their sleeve, which
sometimes, ironically, makes them more impartial (I consider Ads Technica an
example -- their apple coverage is for and by apple enthusiasts, by and large,
but on that basis, ironically, can be critical of apple).

Then again, even in mainline news, someone chooses what to report on, and
really they aren't impartial.

~~~
QAPereo
You need to get a better sense of what “average” looks like... this would be
news to many people, just not on HN.

~~~
gt_
I agree. I think a different tone would be more valuable here...like something
on why this is acceptable. We should all be ashamed for letting our world
stoop so low, time and time again.

------
jgalt212
lobbyists write our laws

PR reps write our news

