When News and Ads Mix

A couple of years back, my dad had commented about the tendency of the news media to “be irresponsible, sensation-mongers, emotion-whippers, a gang that succumbs to the rot of commercialization”.

Of course, things have just gotten worse since then. Many ads look exactly like content: there's even a term for it, the advertorial. There's nothing new about this (magazines have had such sections for ages), but now it's becoming hard to tell the difference between an ad and content since even the font, layout and background looks like regular content. Check out this Economic Times advertorial from 2 years back to see what I mean:

Hard to say which is the advertorial in the pic above, right? (It's the one titled “Move Towards ‘CoreFirst’ Competence”).

And the digital world just followed that trend. Last week, the New York Times unveiled its new website design with some articles labeled as “paid post” and a blue line for demarcation. But Emily Bell worries:

“Separating the church of editorial from the state of advertising is more difficult in digital media; everything is necessarily melded together more closely.”

That is why she fears that:

“Increasingly there will be no lines, blurred, blue or otherwise.”

Andrew Sullivan is horrified too:

“What I didn’t fully expect was the sheer speed and totality of the editorial surrender to the business side; and the almost rapacious move toward handing over the very fonts and headlines and by-lines to advertizers and p.r. merchants as if there were no real difference between writing to sell something and writing because it’s true and your opinion or product of independent reporting.”

To which a reader of Sullivan’s blog added:

“Maybe this is the democratization of content, where content that generates clicks is considered the “best” type of content, but best for whom? It’s as if we’re replacing meat and potatoes with Cheetos – delicious but ultimately frivolous and unsatisfying.”

And that reader also worries where this is headed:

“When you see the metrics every day, and it’s clear that quick-hit crime stories or freak-show stories generate as many clicks as an investigative piece that took weeks to report, what rationale can there possibly be for doing the investigative work, the longer-form stories that actually help explain the workings of a community to the people who live there? That’s what I fear.”

 A valid concern indeed.