Can People Distinguish PR News Releases from News Stories?
By Tom Foremski - October 23, 2007
[This is response to a discussion in the comments section related to my recent post: Social Media Releases are Moving in a Bad Direction - Questionable Ethics in Masquerading as "News" ]
I think lots of people can distinguish content as promotional, as in a press release, or content that is a news story written by a journalist. The latter is trusted more because it is independent of any direct financial incentive.
But just in case readers get muddled, let's clearly mark PR content along these lines: "This is promotional content on behalf of Acme Corporation."
So if a news aggregator such as Google News picks it up by mistake readers can clearly identify the source of the information. They can see that it is self-serving, biased, paid-for-content -- and readers won't confuse it with news journalism.
But there are PR firms and PR practices that profit from a flaw in Google News, Yahoo News, and other large online news distributors, that pick up press releases and distribute them along with news stories written by journalists. There are studies that show that a significant number of readers get confused and think some press releases are news stories. Let's make things clear by marking content clearly.
If you have them, please send me examples of media using press releases in this way. I'll be publishing a few examples over the coming weeks.
This is becoming an interesting discussion and I thank people for their contributions.
It is an important issue because our society needs high quality information to make high quality decisions. Otherwise it is garbage in, garbage out, which doesn't bode well for us making the right decisions on global warming, foreign policy, healthcare, tech policy, and many dozens of extremely important problems.
Let's not let minority elements in PR, media, and search sectors profit from practices that reduce the quality of our information. Let's point out such practices.
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Comments (3)
I agree with the direction you are suggesting, and have significantly changed the format of Tesla's press releases to be more direct and content oriented. Beyond that, I try to use other means of communicating news other than press releases whenever possible. Unfortunately, since so many media outlets rely upon wire releases for their sources, I still feel compelled to issue a wire release for important information to get broad coverage of important news. The wire releases are almost always linked to a blog that goes into more depth on the subject.
Where I am not totally in agreement is the specific suggestion of labeling these releases "promotional content." Releasing something over the wire is not always for promotional purposes - sometimes it is to widely disseminate important information about the company or to disclose important changes to the public. One example is announcing a CEO transition - it would look awfully funny to have a label up top stating "this is promotional content" After reading your post I went back to my previous releases and although the stripped down versions I have been using are pretty obviously company generated content, they don't explicitly state it. I think a good tradeoff is to put the words "Source: Tesla Motors" on top of the release. Intelligent readers will understand what inherent biases to expect.
Posted: October 23, 2007 8:38 AM
On the subject of "topping and tailing", let's face it, that's always happened.
However, the point is that it is on the increase. And it's not hard to see why.
Publishing houses are employing fewer journalists but are demanding more copy out of them - particularly for the web. The temptation to "top and tail" is all too great. And surely part of the role of the journalist is to provide context - but the time, energy and experience to do that is being squeezed.
You might think that situation would benefit PRs and their clients - but that is a very short term view - we need independent journalism to provide the trusted context to information - a world full of information only provided by self interested parties can't be a good thing, can it?
Posted: October 23, 2007 9:17 AM
Darryl: Good points and yes, a simple "source: Tesla Motors" should do the job. (BTW Can I put my name down for a Tesla :-)
Andrew: Yes, top and tailing is one of those practices that is very common. And journalists have rewritten press releases for decades. Usually that is done with releases that are fairly innocuous. In today's online world we could and probably should color code which parts came from the journalist and which were drawn directly from company or PR sources.
Elizabeth: Thanks for the examples. If media sites are trying to make news releases look like their content then that practice should be clearly labeled by the media company. It is certainly not your fault for sending out the releases.
If a news aggregator does pick up press releases and mixes them with news stories then yes, it is fault of the news aggregator. But PR firms shouldn't be trying to exploit such a flaw, which some are doing.
There is no harm done in clearly labeling the source of content. In fact, that could be specified as part of the copyright, that if the content is used in any way, the source must be clearly identified with a link back. [This would result in a lot of Google juice for doing the right thing...!]
Posted: October 23, 2007 4:50 PM