5 ways in which I wish bloggers would emulate traditional media
I’ve been dabbling into the discussion about 23andme and its blogger marketing machine on various blogs and I guess it’s time for an actual post and let everyone have at me, so here goes.
I work in magazine and web publishing. I’m not a trained journalist but I’ve been working hard to train myself, and so I guess I’m bringing that perspective in. I’ll just put that out there at the outset. Also no, traditional media are not perfect.
To be blunt though: I think 23andme is genius, and I have real worries about how they have leveraged the reputations of certain bloggers. And I think my concern about that really is twofold: this company in particular, but also how bloggers are being encouraged in general to approach their blogs as commercial vehicles, without having any training in how things work in other media.
So here are 5 things I wish bloggers knew before they signed:
Division of advertising and editorial
How a magazine works, generally, is that there is an editorial chain of command and an advertising chain of command, and both end in the publisher.
The publisher makes the call on questions like “do we sell space on our cover” and “do we put an ad for a weight-loss product next to a story about weight loss.” The traditional answer to both of these overall is no, by the way. Some of the lines do wobble under pressure, but my experience is that they are still hot topics, and that publishers really do care about maintaining editorial integrity, even when it comes to putting an ad next to related editorial . Because publishers are responsible both for building audience and brand reputation, AND for revenue. And they understand, like no other people, which compromises might be okay and which might not. Are they perfect? No. But they don’t just roll over for advertisers either.
Now on the web, it’s a bit different. Obviously Google Ads set the bar for this when they started serving ads by keyword. So placement of advertising is pretty loose that way. However, web ads are generally served in a way where it’s clear that they are ads. And, as the Torontoist editor pointed out at a recent PWAC meeting, the ratio of editorial to advertising in magazines is about 60% editorial, 40% advertising… a ratio which would torpedo any website. (Imagine if every third page were entirely ads.)
But this is how ads are served. It is not how ads are sold. We generally do not just write editorial about X because Y company might like to have an ad next to X. The editor’s job is to assign stories that serve the reader. Advertising’s job is to sell the audience gained to the advertiser.
The reason blog marketing is so exciting is that this division is removed. The blogger, that is, the writer and editor of most stories, is also the publisher and the director of sales.
Generally speaking companies cannot get a publisher to go out and hire a writer to say something like “my daughter died, and here are 500 words on this tragic tale, and now that you are totally emotionally engaged, I’ll tell you that the next pregnancy I went out and bought an ACME belly monitor and it made me feel better.”
Just so you know.
Context
Part of the role of a publication is to provide context for stories. I have had the pleasure of working with editors who really care about this. They are highly aware that part of the role of journalists is to place information in context and a lot of editing goes on around this.
So for example, generally speaking an editor would be careful about ensuring that a story about a drug discusses both the benefits and the risks of a drug, and not just the benefits. Serious efforts are made to present varying viewpoints. Stories are killed if we can only get one side of them, or presented as only one side. Even the visual treatment of a story plays into this: we don’t present light editorial seriously, etc.
Again, it’s pretty exciting for marketing and sales to have people present their products in the context of their life experience, especially if they are providing a testimonial. There is not the same pressure on bloggers to find an opposing viewpoint, and simply saying “it might not work for you” does not carry the same weight as two conflicting actual stories.
Editorial integrity and conflict of interest
When an editor assigns pieces, he or she generally keeps an eye out for conflict of interest. This is obviously also not a perfect process, but we do not assign pieces to marketing VPs for a company, for example. They would love it if we did, and it would be free for us, but it would turn editorial into advertorial. (You know advertorial? The pages that say at the top “a sponsored feature”? That costs a lot of money, and there are lots of rules, which vary from publication to publication but include font choices, etc.)
Generally speaking, if you are on the payroll of a company, you’re assumed to have a conflict of interest. So, a magazine wouldn’t generally hire someone who works for Weight Watchers to write a serious piece on weight loss research. Sometimes on the web we do play around with this a bit, but we’re careful to ensure that if we’ve say, had a Q&A with a trainer who works for a particular gym, that this information is front and centre.
[Also, reviews can be a bit different. Of course this is why Consumer Reports has a niche market. I don't actually have any objection to blog reviews.]
The PR-media relationship is both a grey area and an industry problem: journalists do rely on press releases and PR people to help us find stories. It requires Constant Vigilance on every level, from the individual writer to the top editor. PR companies do woo journalists. Travel journalism in particular is so expensive that the press junket has gradually moved out of “terrible practice” to “common practice.” But plain old gifts, generally, are not acceptable (sure the odd lip balm gets passed around, but at my company the PR stuff goes into charity sales). Money is not acceptable at all.
People lose their jobs over this stuff.
Fact checking
I will admit that magazines are better fact-checked than most media (and better than web generally, although we try), so they are the gold standard. But here it is. A copy editor (or her minion fact checker) is responsible for checking the facts of each story, quotes, etc. This can be a very minute level of detail.
One example from my own day this morning: I wrote a teaser for a piece of editorial that said “one of X number of women over X age hired here.” My copy editor (I don’t always have one, but for this I do) tossed it back to me with a note: “in the last five years.” Because she checks these things out, even if it’s just a cheery blurb saying here, come read our story.
We check the sources for PR releases. We decide if they’re good enough to go on.
Yes it matters for your freelance career
Yes, I read blogs of people I hire (if they have them). If you have written about a company from whom you have received money to write in your blog, on the topic for which I might hire you - I won’t.
People who start off as journalists and then start blogs usually are aware of this. They know not to torpedo their expertise. People who blog and then look for freelance gigs often aren’t.
Next post I’ll talk about 23andme in particular.
Upgraded
Well thank you to you-know-who-you-are for clueing me in that my comments were broken.
I upgraded, and I chose this theme quickly, so we’ll see if it works. And if I like it. :)
werked fur mee
We took Noah down to Pages today, where I annoyed the staff asking them about their lease. (They’re a great independent bookstore with a landlord/cost problem.) Before I bugged the staff though, we had the following conversation:
Noah: I want to get the angry skitty book.
Me: ??? What honey?
Noah: The angry book! With the skitty!
I can’t find the exact one but it was something like this:
And actually it kind of blew me away. He can read for meaning! Even if he can’t read scientist. And thinks Skitty is a word.
Warning: grossness ahead
This post is gross but, I don’t know. I feel like tossing my dysfunction at the world today!
There is one thing worse than bleeding terribly and passing a clot the size of your hand (!!) as apparently the miscarriage was not over (!!!). That is having your 3.5 year old walk into the bathroom when you’re in the middle of dealing with it and wondering “have you been shot mummy?”
The poor child is going to think menstruation is like some horror flick.
Anyways, yes, sought medical attention; all is - not resolved, but dealing. Noah, I hope, will be fine. Must start locking bathroom door.
I am sad. And yet, not. And that is the problem.
I’ve really been split and dissociated the last few weeks. Not in the movie of the week way, but in the more pedestrian sense. It’s kind of an odd mixture and I’d like to post about it.
Noah’s been sick again, and Carl was sick, and I was sick. So that all was kind of lousy. It wasn’t the kind of sick where we were all abed unable to rise, but it was the kind of sick where people threw up and then were tired out and grumpy and stuff. It didn’t interfere with everything, but it interfered with quite a bit of it.
Easter was wonderful, and awful. Out here in the real world, my mother in law was down, and played with Noah a lot so I had time to putter around. I got through a stack of filing in preparation for taxes and cooked and cleaned and went to the Silver Snail with Noah.
At the same time, I have been feeling desperately terribly sad, if I stop puttering around and going to the Silver Snail. I don’t know if this is a multiple thing, a grief thing, a crazy thing, or a normal thing, but as soon as I have stopped long enough to do anything that touches on my inner life of thought and art and those kinds of things, all that has come up - welled up - is sadness and grief and tension and fear and anger. Quite a lot of anger.
I think perhaps this is what people don’t get about dissociation and how it really works. It cuts one’s life apart. This is good, in that you really do get to enjoy — at least for a time — the good parts. But the bad parts become a festering swampy bit.
I have been Twittering as my “real” [legal identity] self a bit, because my workplace asked me to and I am trying to get in there and understand the tool, but also as an experiment in identity: do I have anything to say to the world as the person that we present. Most of our Internet personal stuff has been our multiple selves bursting forth.
And as a result I have cheery Twitters from the weekend, because at those moments that was what was happening. That was not a lie.
And yet a whole other side has been going on. I haven’t been able to log in to PernMUSH to have fun, because I do not feel fun, I feel angry and upset and irrational. And I am perhaps a little too careful not to land on that soil with those feelings, given my history.
So at night, I have been sitting in my office some nights wiping tears off my face. Sometimes mine, sometimes other people’s in the system.
I had a fight with Lohr & Sassy. Lynn was really having a hard time in abuse-crazy ways, internally, expressing them in her own little way which got Lyria mad at her and caused several nights of nightmares and lack of sleep. What is this, 2001?
I could easily pin these things on sources: Easter has rough, rough, rough abuse memories associated (and perhaps, for the first time since becoming a parent, it’s okay to hit on that again); Noah is at an age where we definitely were being abused. Emily stuff is still around. I am pretty sure we are not going to be able to have another child biologically because I have had had: miscarriage, period, period two weeks later, none of which bodes especially well but I am tired of doctors. Also of my own hormones. My sister, bless her, is having a girl and I’m so glad for her but of course it does raise sad. And of course, it’s the season of crazy. So, you know, it’s okay.
Except, it’s not.
There was a time when things were more holistic. Now they are not. I think a lot of this is about Noah and about being a good parent, which means (right now) doing a good job at work so as not to sink in the recession, and being with him in a non-dramatic, good way. In a sense it’s a stiff upper lip thing too.
These are not terrible things but it is a strange ride, to be on two divergent paths at once. Some of us are growing professionally and as a parent and gearing up to garden and keeping house and Twittering and blogging. And some of us are stuck and frustrated and miserable and unhappy and unable even to express this well in poetry or art. I know, it sounds like therapy time, but I’m not even really ready to get that far.
Oh well, it should be interesting.
Housework drinking game
We really need one.
Today is kind of catch up day, since yesterday was a shower for my sister and a kids’ birthday party and various other things.
So - 1.5 hrs of yard clean up and three loads of laundry later, I’m thinking there should be some kind of drugged out payoff.
Rant.
If I can tell, when you bring your child in to a indoor-playground party of 14 kids, that your kid is going to be sick, maybe you should clue in.
When he vomits 45 minutes later, that’s bad enough.
But cleaning him up and plonking him down at the table to eat cake? (which he, sensibly, will not do) Next to my kid?
That’s really annoying!!!!!!!!!!!
I owe people mail. On it tomorrow. :)
It got better
The password for the previous post is “Lyria” so go ahead. I just don’t want it search friendly because it gets into stuff at my work about other people, and so I am making a small attempt to keep it a little private.
The summary is that I feel better. Still having recession heebie jeebies, but otherwise better.
Protected: I may have overreacted.
A new kind of bottom
I’m having a hard time today. A really hard time. A medicate-me hard time.
It’s largely work-related. It’s partly a feeling of being trapped (media is its own sort of car manufacturing right now; it’s either keep the job you have or get out I guess) and partly actual crap going down, possibly leading to layoffs. And then it’s the question of well so then what would I do? I don’t know. I really don’t. The market would be kind of saturated for my skills.
I loved this job in theory. Some parts of it I might, but they seem to be disappearing under the rest. I don’t know. I’m going to slog through it because what’s the alternative? I’m not sure what else I would want to do with my life. And with Carl’s job unstable, it doesn’t seem like a good time to have a little crisis. Even if public half-day kindergarten waves its little flag over yonder, I think having a single breadwinner right now would be so stressful I’d throw up every day. Which is a bit silly, but it’s where my head is at.
I think the truth is that I’m feeling like many of the best things turn to mud. Emily dying. Finding out I’m not great at the SAHM gig, or at least, I wasn’t. Getting a dream job only to start to feel like I’m in a perennial Dilbert cartoon, and I’m part of the problem - my health, Noah’s health. I don’t know.
I can’t balance things lately.
It’s Easter. Lynn is all weird. I feel weird. I feel separated from the rest of humanity.
And I’m tired. Noah is improving, but slowly.
ETA: Ironically last week I gave a big pep talk to a group of writers.