Rethinking the Role of “Advertisers”

Quartz websiteWriting last week for the Nieman Journalism Lab, Ken Doctor analyzed “The newsonomics of the Quartz business launch.” It should be required reading for every B2B journalist and publisher.

In identifying the key aspects and implications of the business news startup from Atlantic Media, Doctor touched on a number of key points for any business-oriented publication. One in particular stood out for me:

Call it underwriting, sponsorship, or share of voice, Quartz is leaping over the littered landscape of impression-based display advertising and selling sponsorships. It will start with four sponsors, who are paying based on their association with The New. In a twist we’ll see more of — another reason Quartz is worth watching — these advertisers are creating their own content for Quartz readers, through something called “Quartz Bulletin.”

Atlantic Media seems to have accepted what Lewis DVorkin keeps telling us (most recently last Thursday): Content is content, whether it comes from an editor or an advertiser. As company president Justin Smith told Adweek, “We believe branded content is going to be an essential part of the site itself.”

Like Forbes, with its AdVoice product, Quartz recognizes that the old advertising model—limited to hermetically sealed ad units dropped beside editorial content—must change. Though the process is fraught with danger, publishers will have to start breaking down the wall that separates editorial from advertising and find a new model for sharing their media with their “advertisers”—a name that may likewise need to change.

Forbes and Atlantic Media may not have found the right model yet. But unlike too many other legacy publishers, they have at least recognized that the old one is broken and will never be mended.

Beware the Witch-Hunting Impulse

My experience today reading Joe Konrath’s “Writers Code of Ethics” was probably exactly what he intended. From points one through three—never write or pay for reviews of your own work—I was in complete agreement. From points four through six—don’t ask friends or fans to review your work—I was thinking, “wow, that’s pretty strict.”  By point nine—”I will never allow anyone to send out copies of my books to be reviewed”— I was suspicious. Long before I got to his twenty-third and final point of ethics, I realized he had veered into satire.

What spurred Konrath’s gradual escalation into ethical absurdity was a manifesto of sorts by a group of authors condemning other authors behind a recent rash of “sock-puppet,” or faked, and purchased book reviews. His aim, I take it, was not to defend dishonest marketing, but to warn us against mob instincts:

“All of you pointing your fingers and proclaiming your piety? Get back to working on your books, not judging your peers.”

In the recent uproar over the apparent multiple plagiarisms and fabrications by Jonah Lehrer and one instance of plagiarism by Fareed Zakaria, I’ve sensed a disquieting rush to judgment. In each case, the acts are indefensible. But for those of us striving to be ethical, unreservedly condemning them, as Barry Eisler puts it, is a dead end. That lack of reserve leads all too readily to overreactions and unfair accusations.

Viewing ethical mistakes in black and white makes life simple. But we can learn more, and become better people and better writers, by trying to understand the complex intentions and motivations behind those errors.

Let’s Not Confuse Morality with Quality: Jonah Lehrer and Plagiarism

Jonah Lehrer at PopTech 2009

Jonah Lehrer

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, I’ve been deeply bothered for the last few days by the uproar over Jonah Lehrer’s reuse of his writing in various publications. I know almost nothing about Lehrer other than what I’ve read in the many stories about his so-called “self-plagiarism,” and have no position on his work to defend. I also agree with the idea that reusing bits of your previously published work in new articles is pretty lame. But the suggestion many writers have made that his practice is akin to plagiarism is simply wrong. It confuses quality standards with moral ones.

The controversy began with the Romenesko story last week that in a number of blog posts for the New Yorker, Lehrer had reused some paragraphs he had written for an earlier article in the Wall Street Journal. Subsequently several more instances of similar recycling from other publications were uncovered. (Steve Buttry, in the course of reflecting on his own (transparent) habits of repetition, provides a good summary of the matter.)

These are interesting findings, well worth public discussion. But they are more the material of literary criticism than of ethical analysis. They tell us that Lehrer’s range as a writer is less broad than we thought, perhaps, and that he doesn’t always have fresh insights. But they don’t tell us he’s a thief.

And possibly no one is saying that, quite. In his Slate piece on Lehrer, for instance, Josh Levin uses the phrase “self-plagiarism” somewhat jokingly. “Writing the same words twice” may not be a moral offense, he seems to say, but “it will piss off your editors” and “disappoint your customers.” Such “self-plagiarism is bad for the brand,” he concludes—not, as we might expect from real plagiarism, bad for the soul.

Similarly, while using the P-word liberally, Poynter‘s Kelly McBride suggests that Lehrer’s sin is less than mortal: “Had he stolen words from someone else—plagiarized-plagiarized rather than self-plagiarized—we’d all be calling it quits.” Instead, his readers are merely disappointed; their “enthusiasm wilts.”

Fine. If I’d been a Lehrer reader, I might be disappointed too. But to use the word plagiarism even jokingly or ironically in connection with what he did veers perilously close to character assassination. The damage it does exceeds any done by Lehrer’s recycling.

When this careless or invidious habit spreads to the New York Times, which wrote that Lehrer “has become the latest high-profile journalist to be caught up in a plagiarism scandal,” you know it’s excessive. It doesn’t matter that Times reporter Jennifer Schuessler immediately added that the scandal included “a counterintuitive twist that could come right out of his own books: The journalist he has been accused of borrowing from is himself.” What many readers will take away from this overly clever sentence is the false notion that Lehrer is a plagiarist.

One of the most fascinating aspects of this story is how many of the commenters on these critics’ posts reject the association with plagiarism. Some don’t even object to Lehrer’s reuse of his writing. In contrast to the critics’ high dudgeon, their attitude seems to be, “big deal.”

Is the critical reaction to Lehrer possibly influenced by the fact that he is very young, very smart, and very successful? Well, consider this. If a journalist we’d never heard of, like Paresh Jha, accused of fabricating sources and quotes, had instead been accused of recycling his own sentences, would we be reading about it now on Poynter? I think not.

I’m leaving open the possibility that I just don’t get it. Maybe there is a portentous ethical and moral issue in repeating yourself. But even if there is, its magnitude surely falls well short of plagiarism, and the term shouldn’t be used even humorously or ironically to describe Lehrer. It’s reasonable, given what he did, to call him a bad writer. But that’s no basis for calling him a bad person.

Photo credit: Kris Krüg/Pop!Tech

Curation: Add Value and Pass It Along

Among all the topics that seem to rile journalists and publishers these days, perhaps the most contentious is curation. Is summarizing and linking to another person’s article an honorable act or a form of theft? How can you distinguish between good curation and bad curation?

Let me begin to answer those questions by summarizing and linking to Rex Hammock’s post last week on this very issue.

The act of finding great content and linking to it, he says, is a fine idea. Though he dislikes the term curation, he approves of the activity as it was originally practiced. But recently, he says, it has come to mean something less good:

Over the past three or so years, the term media curation has evolved in its meaning to being less-and-less an act of help and service and more and more a term that’s used to add lipstick to a pig of a business model that is based on something like the following: “go re-write stuff you find elsewhere that’s about whatever is trending on Google and bury a link to them somewhere towards the end of the story so we can claim it’s not merely re-writing their story.”

Hammock’s guideline for avoiding this fix seems pretty clear: If you can’t add value to a story, just link to it.

Perhaps not so clear is how to add value. I think most rational people would agree with him that many Huffington Post or Business Insider stories are really just rewrites. But short of that extreme, there’s plenty of disagreement.

The best recent example, perhaps, comes from Kashmir Hill’s Forbes.com story last February recapping Charles Duhigg’s New York Times article on consumer marketing and data mining. As Mathew Ingram wrote, opinion was sharply divided over whether Hill stole Duhigg’s story “in an attempt to get pageviews from someone else’s work” or whether she instead served a valuable function in highlighting and directing readers to his article.

When I read Hill’s story, I don’t see an attempt to get pageviews. What I see, rather, is someone who is intensely interested in Duhigg’s subject matter, admiring of his work, and intellectually engaged with his ideas.

I can’t find similar motivations in the pedestrian article Hammock criticizes. It’s simply the output of an aggregation serf.

The contrast between these two attempts at curation suggests to me a test that any writer should apply before blogging about another person’s story: Are you are genuinely engaged with it? If the answer is yes, chances are good you will add value in passing it along.