In the last couple of posts, I’ve focused on how the social audience is demanding trustworthy content and how the media is largely failing to meet that demand. Today I want to focus on where they are actually starting to get it:

The corporations that used to be advertisers.

Yes, the very organizations that are accused of perverting journalism are actually the source of salvation for journalism, currently in the B2B tech world primarily, but it will expand. I’ve written about this process for several years now, but here’s a recap of how it happened.

The world wide web made it possible for corporations to distribute press releases and marketing material to the customer base through email and websites, bypassing traditional media. Advertising revenue was diverted in the budgets for those purposes.

The drop in revenue caused the media to start cutting editorial staff making comprehensive coverage of industries very difficult if not impossible.

The audience for the media began to notice the drop off in coverage quality and started losing audience trust. Circulation suffered but the media had already turned to electronic distribution and found ways to fudge readership numbers and engagement to keep the ad rates up. The advertisers were not sure they were getting accurate numbers but could not prove it. Advertising budgets continued to shrink.

The media began to realize they had pretty good lists of subscribers and could create “communities” out of them and sell access to those communities to former advertisers to help them become “journalists” and rebrand their marketing materials. Since the corporations were providing 90 percent of the content, the media could jettison more editorial staff and use the remaining to edit the marketing content into something resembling news, and charge up the wazoo for the service.

The corporations learned a very interesting: There lists of their customers and potential customers were as good or better than the media’s. So why did they need to pay for the media lists. They also discovered there were services that would repurpose content elsewhere (they used to be called plagiarists) and deliver it to the corporations for their own internal media.

Then they learned that those services produced crappy content that no one read. They learned this because they hired other services to give them readership information they could not get from the media.

Then they realized that there are a lot of out of work journalists who will work for less than the media wants to charge them for the services of an experienced journalist... and they would be happy to do the work because it paid better than their media jobs paid. The corporations now had the ability to be their own media and by allowing their in-house journalists more editorial freedom than they were getting from third party media, they could raise the level of trust their customers would have for them.

This last bullet point is where we are today and it is only just beginning. Intel, Qualcomm, Adobe, and a long list of significant companies have already launched independent online publications, run by significant journalists. Other companies, like Cadence Design and Oracle, have created editor-in-chief positions to oversee all social content and filled the positions with solid journalists. Slowly but surely, the importance of truth seen from multiple positions and developing trust has become a core principal for many corporations.

So if corporations in the B2B space are taking over for third party media, what does the future hold? That’s next.

I've been a journalist for several decades now and for most of that time, I've bought into that myth... but since the advent of social media, my belief in that myth has eroded into virtual non-existance. I worked very hard on maintaining objectivity in everything I did in the early years and discovered something uncomfortable. The closer any journalist approached a story with real objectivity, the less likely that journalist would have a career. The more they were able to artfully inject their opinion into a piece, the faster their career rose.

Interesting story on CNN today on how the "objective" press is manipulated by people with a particular axe to grind. The story reveals how whistleblowers, like Edward Snowden, have sought out journalists that have a reputation for dislking certain political extremes for the purpose of gaining public sympathy for their actions. For Snowden, his use of The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald have paid off handsomely with offers of political asylum from countries like Iceland.

I'm not passing judgement on anyone here, I'm just opening the curtain on the myth of absolute objectivity in the press.

The Guardian, for example, is the only British publication that has a web presence specifically targeted at US news and audiences. It is also an unabashedly liberal publication politically and takes great pleasure in reporting news that is damaging to the US government... no matter who is in charge of it. They make a lot of money doing that and that's specifically why Snowden leaked the information to them. That left the US media scrambling to catch up and take on varying positions on the issue. For example, Fox News has been braying about Obama's involvement in the secret surveillance and MSNBC has been just short of calling for Snowden's head. So far, I have not seen ANY reporting that could be close to being called objective.

This is, however, nothing new. Even the most objective journalists I know have subjective methods for determining what should or should not be covered. One well-known journalist told me years ago that he has stopped taking calls and emails from any PR person that he doesn't already know and has worked with. Another will only accept direct messages from Twitter (and you can't reach him unless he has connected with you. I've also talked with journalists who say that when there are five companies that are involved in a particular technology issue, and all are saying virtually the same thing about the issue, she will only include the input from the largest company of the five, because it's better for the SEO of the publication (not to mention that the largest company is an advertiser).

Speaking of advertising bias, I've had several journalists (all very good and very respected) who have sworn up and down that advertising doesn't affect their reporting, bitch and rail whenever they come back from an interview with a company that never advertises in their publication... or any other. Yes, those journalists, to their credit, still write up the interview, but does anyone actually believe that the coverage is not affected by their anger?

It is not just important, but absolutely necessary for a journalist to be as objective as possible in reporting news... but in today's day and time it rarely happens, nor does anyone really believe it does unless the reporting agrees with their particular position. Then it's absolutely fair and balanced.

How do we move the needle back towards reality? It's not the job of the journalist for the most part. It's the job of the source of the information. Objectivity and truth are the responsibility of everyone today.

Those filthy corporations will save journalism

Exploiting "objective" bias in traditional media