Advertising plays an important role in my field of journalism. In fact, after doing a bit of research, I believe advertising plays a more fundamental role in how those in journalism understand its purpose in society than I ever before realized.
Most journalism majors at UT have taken a class with Bob Jensen before, so we are very familiar with the idea that advertising can influence the content of a news publication. Publications might be unwilling to cover an advertiser in a negative way. In basic reporting classes, we are taught that we should avoid covering advertisers if we can, so we can’t be seen as having any biases in that coverage.
When we think about what ideal journalism looks like, words like “neutral,” “independent” and “impartial” might pop into our heads. Those who are familiar with the history of journalism in this country will know that this ideal of journalism has not always existed. Randolph Hearst, for example, sensationalized conflict between Spain and the United States to start the Spanish-American War in 1898 and sell more newspapers. And during the colonial era of American history, the vast majority of newspapers in the colonies were funded by political parties and other organizations.
According to this post by the Center for Ethical Journalism at the University of Wisconsin, newspapers in the United States began shifting to being independent during the 1800s because newspaper owners realized there was more money to be had in advertising than in being paid by an organization. The ideal we associate with journalism today — neutral and unbiased reporting — came soon after.
Fast forward to the modern era, and advertising revenue has begun to dwindle. This raises important questions about journalism’s current business model and how it can be improved.
In recent years, the controversial advertising method, native advertising, has entered into the world of journalism advertising. Here is a clip from the Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, where he describes what native advertising is and why it’s so controversial.
There are two main points from this video that I want to emphasize.
The first is that little tags on stories labeling them as sponsored content does not justify native advertising. The purpose of native advertising is to blend into the rest of a publication’s content. The average consumer does not often recognize what the labels mean.
The second is that publications are turning to native advertising in desperation, as other forms of revenue dry up. It does not solve the problem to point fingers at journalists. If the public consensus was that native advertising is wrong, the public could start paying for journalism to stop it. However, I’m not sure if I see that consensus among the public.
Oliver points out a specific example of native advertising from the New York Times, where the newspaper took the sponsored content from Orange is the New Black and used it as an opportunity to report on women’s prisons.
I have been seeing more of this sort of serious native advertising, different from the sillier native advertising that Buzzfeed is famous for, more and more recently. Here are some examples:
This raises some questions for me. Is there potential for real, serious journalism in native advertising? Is this type of journalism something that the public can ever learn to trust? And does native advertising signal a shift in the business model of journalism and potentially how we understand its purpose in society?
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