How the Main Stream News Media is Putting Credibility on Sale

By James Bowers

In the course of my job I talk to a lot of sales reps from media publications. With a drop of more than 39% in print advertising sales by newspapers from 2011 to 2017, it’s not surprising that they’re trying anything they can to boost sales. As traditional outlets like newspapers and magazines struggle against the onslaught of digital advertising, publishers are trying to reinvent their medium to make themselves relevant to advertisers once again.

I’m all for creativity in the advertising space. (Heck, we once purchased a 25-foot inflatable dinosaur for a client to protest a rival’s outdated policies.) But there’s a recent trend in advertising that I worry will hurt publishers’ long-term chances of ever gaining back some of their once-dominant market share: The push to native advertising, or “sponsored content.”

To define that term: Native advertising is when a publication will take an advertiser’s content and publish it as a story on their website (albeit with some kind of labeling that is supposed to indicate that the content is “sponsored.”) Every national newspaper rep I’ve met with in the past three years has pitched some variation of native advertising. Native advertising is far more lucrative on a revenue basis than banner ads; unlike digital ads, which can be purchased at a discount on exchanges, buyers are willing to pay a premium price for the New York Times or Wall Street Journal masthead.

Newspapers have always allowed advertisers to publish their own editorials as ads, provided the copy passed the standards set up by the publication. The pages of America’s most prominent newspapers have all carried the 1,000-word rantings of those wealthy enough to pay rate card prices for full-page ads. (You’ve probably skipped past more than a few of these, which gives you a sense of their effectiveness!) Native advertising has taken that idea a step further: Websites of major newspapers make it tougher to discern paid content, and when people link to those stories on Facebook and Twitter, the likelihood of someone mistaking that content as real reporting grows even more.

This may be a great option for an advertiser, but it doesn’t take an advertising expert to see the slippery slope here for the news media. By definition, native advertising options blur the line between sales and editorial. As publications shed the experienced professional sales people they can no longer afford, less experienced people in the news industry have to wear multiple hats. On multiple occasions in the past year I’ve heard stories of someone involved in the reporting side of a publication selling sponsored content or ad space. The unsaid implication—that paid advertising could and would affect the tone and content of future reporting.

In the era of “fake news,” this threatens the already fragile credibility of the mainstream media.

In recent focus groups I’ve led, one of the leading concerns of voters from both sides of the aisle is real concern about bias in the mass media. According to polling by Gallup in 2018, only 38 percent of young people (those 18-29 years old) have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the mass media. The finger of blame can pointed at many factors that are influencing this trend of distrust, and I’m not trying to pin the blame on one factor alone. But the publishers of America’s biggest newspapers should be careful their sales department isn’t chipping away at the foundation of their editorial team’s efforts to maintain credible reputation.

James Bowers is Senior Vice President and Creative Director at Berman and Company a public relations firm based in Washington, DC.