Tag Archives: Ethics

Content Marketers: Think “Editorial”

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One of the most exciting areas today in the realm of what we used to call publishing is content marketing. As befits a rapidly evolving discipline, there is no single, satisfactory definition for this new activity.  A few days ago, Joe Pulizzi itemized some of the different ways to describe content marketing, then added, “there are another 30 names for this including branded content, customer media, custom publishing and the list goes on.”  But one word that rarely shows up in such lists is editorial. That’s a pity.

Not that I object to content. It’s a useful word that covers the variety of media that marketers can use, while editorial is narrower, mostly limited to writing. That is, all editorial is content, but not all content is editorial.

But as a word, content has its downside. To my ear, at least, it suggests an undifferentiated mass extruded by machinery.  Editorial, by contrast, suggests active involvement in content, a filtering of it through a careful act of judgment. Where there’s editorial, there must be an editor. Where there’s content, there must be . . . who knows?

Then why is editorial such a rare word in blogs about content marketing? Perhaps because the field is, so far, being driven largely by people with marketing backgrounds. That’s not to say they don’t appreciate the qualities the word connotes, but that by training, it doesn’t come immediately to mind to describe what they do.

That may be why the one place you’ll see the word in content marketing blogs is in discussions of editorial calendars. As every editor knows, that’s a marketing tool as much as, if not more than, an editorial one. But when it is not conjoined with calendar, the word editorial rarely appears.

Resistance to other uses of the word may be due to the traditional separation of powers between editorial and marketing. In the old media world, marketers didn’t do editorial, and editors didn’t do marketing.

All that, of course, has changed. Marketers absolutely do editorial now–they just don’t use the word. But as more editors enter the content marketing fray (the hiring of Jesse Noyes by Eloqua is but the latest example), that old habit may die off.

Why is one word so important? Because unlike content, editorial isn’t a neutral term. There can be good editorial and bad editorial, but buried not so deeply in the word is the intent to get the facts straight, state them effectively, and serve the reader well. It may just be my bias as an editor, but to me, the word reminds us that the greatest success of content marketing will come from adopting not just editorial tools, but editorial values as well.

The Cooks Source Copyright Outrage: Not the Norm

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One of the hottest Internet memes last week was the story of how blogger Monica Gaudio complained to a print magazine, Cooks Source, that it had used her work without permission and got told that, really, she should be grateful to have it stolen. (The incident was covered well by TechDirt, Wired, and many others.)

Sadly, the only thing that made this story go viral was the editor’s response:

“But honestly Monica, the web is considered ‘public domain’ and you should be happy we just didn’t ‘lift’ your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”

In other words, not only was it OK to use the content without permission, but in fact, the magazine was doing the poor writer a favor, both by giving her more exposure and by improving it with a little crack copy editing.

The aggrieved author is quoted by Time as saying that the magazine “broke the rules of the Internet basically, and the Internet got pissed off.”

If only. For the most part, the Internet blithely overlooks such transgressions. What caught its attention here was the irresistible combination of ignorance, arrogance, and bad writing in the editor’s response.

Though the Internet makes feckless appropriation of other people’s content easier, there’s nothing new about the practice or the attitudes that underly it. As editorial director of a B2B publisher, both before and after the advent of the Web, I often dealt with unauthorized use of our content.  Except in the most egregious cases, no one I spoke to understood that there was anything wrong with such use.

We used to make a decent sum of money from reprints of our articles, mostly for companies that we covered. But not infrequently, those companies would object that we were charging too much “just to reprint” the articles, and would instead do it themselves. The idea that they owed us anything for the value of the content itself never occurred to them.

It got worse once the Web arrived and reprinting was simply a matter of copying and pasting. I remember speaking with one company manager who said we were charging too much for the right to reuse our articles on his Web site ($500 for unlimited use, as I recall). The Wall Street Journal, he said, only charged him something like $10. What he didn’t understand, of course, was that $10 was the fee to download the article for personal use, not to republish it on his own site.

The most irritating offenders were the sleazy market research firms that published high-priced reports based largely on reuse of our content or, worse yet, outright plagiarism of it.

What I learned, ultimately, was not to get too upset by all this unauthorized reuse. Economically, it never made sense to do much more than make a phone call to object. Though it was morally offensive, in practical terms, the harm done was minimal.

Now more than ever, the reality is, if it can happen, it will happen. That doesn’t make it right, but what it does tell you is that you shouldn’t waste too much time and effort fighting it—unless you’re given the kind of spectacular opportunity for viral browbeating that the Cooks Source editor extended on a platter.

The best strategy for dealing with copying is to accept that it will happen and stay ahead of everyone else by continuing to put out valuable and unique content. Yes, your content will get ripped off by others, sometimes subtly, sometimes not. Often that copying will be to your benefit. But even when it isn’t, you have better things to worry about: all that content you still haven’t produced.

New Editorial Rules Nod to Content Marketing

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In revised guidelines issued yesterday, the American Society of Magazine Editors, or ASME, addressed types of potential conflict between editorial and advertising content that have grown like weeds in recent years.

Other observers, including Gawker and Media Week, have covered the more prominent changes, such as advertising on magazine covers and “invasive or interruptive” advertising.

But of greatest interest to B2B Memes is the addition of a sentence to section 9 of the guidelines, “Editorial Participation in Advertising.” It reads as follows:

“Publications engaged in or associated with the manufacturing or marketing of branded products and services should ensure that advertisements or promotions for their own products and services cannot be mistaken for editorial content.”

This stricture can refer to the fairly traditional practice among many publishers of covering their own conferences and trade shows. But my guess is that ASME is adding it now because of the rising trend of publishers selling their own nontraditional products and services.

In taking on this new role, publishers may be finding that associating these products and services with their editorial content—in other words, engaging in content marketing—is a significant challenge to editorial ethics.

As advertisers abandon advertising in favor of their own content marketing, this trend among magazine publishers, which has been noted before on this blog, will only accelerate. In the process, I wonder, will ethical guidelines from ASME and other editorial groups evolve to cover content marketing practices in greater detail?

And more intriguingly, will content marketers from the advertising end of the content marketing–publishing continuum adopt similar ethical standards? The distinctions between advertising and editorial content so clear to traditional publishers may be much less obvious to traditional advertisers.

One way or another, content marketing will get its own code of ethics. But whether that code will call for a clear distinction between editorial and promotional content is still, I fear, an open question.

Editorial Wall, or Prison Wall?

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There’s been some fervent debate in recent days about the risks of an entrepreneurial role for editors. (Note: By the term editor I mean any journalist, whether writer, reporter, or editor.) Does being involved in the business side of a media enterprise mean being involved in sales? And does breaking down the sacred wall between editorial and sales mean that editorial must be tainted?

What set off this latest skirmish was an article in the Guardian by Roy Greenslade (lately a fecund source of inspiration for B2B Memes) concerning UK editor and blogger Marc Reeves. In a speech last June, he argued that editors should get involved in all sides of a business, even if that meant selling advertising. The way Reeves put it was particularly blunt:

“And to all of you who are saying ‘Sorry I’m just a journalist, I don’t sell advertising or organise events…’ I say: tough: that’s just the way it will be from now on.”

I admire the plain speaking, but my first reaction was, Are you nuts? Realistically, the average editor is probably the last person you would want to sell advertising. Compared with the average salesperson, he or she is a relative introvert. Taking advertising orders is one thing, but actively selling is quite another.

But even if this practical objection is sound, the theoretical one—that any involvement by an editor in sales necessarily influences editorial content—is not. Is it really so difficult to honor editorial ethics and pursue business interests at the same time?

Historically, most publishing enterprises have replied that it is, and have discouraged editorial involvement in business. This was the point of a comment in an ongoing discussion of Greenslade’s article on in a LinkedIn group sponsored by The Media Briefing (you’ll need to join the group to see the discussion). Therein, Martin Cloake argued that content creators have been deliberately kept on the sidelines:

“Traditionally, it’s been people from the ad/sales side who have risen to top positions in media companies. They in turn have pushed the view that journalists aren’t commercially savvy. In many cases they are the people who see content as just the stuff between the ads.”

Indeed, you could make the case, twisted though it may sound, that editors did not so much create their codes of conduct as have those codes imposed on them by the business side; that those codes were not about editorial freedom as much as editorial constraint; and that the editorial wall is just as much a prison wall.

My point is not to disparage editorial codes of ethics. I’m a big fan. But we should think of them not as editorial codes but publishing codes. And editors can help make that happen not by remaining imprisoned in their ivory towers but by getting involved in business.

One commenter on Greenslade’s article argued that there is considerable appeal to editors in being able to tell pissed-off advertisers, “I’m nothing to do with advertising.”  I’ve used variations of that line in the past myself. But, really, it’s lame. The advertiser knows it and the editor knows it. Worse, it can sound weak, ignorant, and arrogant. As a representative of your company, you’re telling customers that you couldn’t care less about their business. Spoken from a business point of view, the gist of the answer should be the same (i.e., no bending to advertiser pressure on editorial). But that answer should also be informed by an understanding and appreciation of business, both the editor’s and the advertiser’s.

In another response to Greenslade, Jeff Jarvis argued that editorial codes and walls “turn out to be translucent and leaky moral condoms.” When journalists have key business roles in their enterprises, he said, “they can and must navigate” ethical conflicts and “are in a better position to do so” precisely because they are qualified in business. “Whether or not they sell the ad, the conflict and choices are the same.”

And though he didn’t explicitly make the same conspiratorial argument I’m toying with here, he seemed to suggest that the business deck was deliberately stacked against him in his editorial past:

“I learned this lesson when I started Entertainment Weekly in an industry full of standards and codes and walls and even so found my managers (editorial as well as business) trying to profoundly corrupt the enterprise for the sake of business ends and I did not have sufficient business cred to fight them down.”

I understand why editors have been shackled for so long. By their nature, they are disruptive. In a traditional media business, that was a problem. But in a new-media world that thrives on disruption, editors may at last be breaking through their prison walls.

Journalists as Buzzword Killers

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A post today from Josh Gordon on words to avoid in content marketing gets to the heart of what content marketers must do: think like journalists.

In his post,  he reports on an effort by PR strategist Adam Sherk to enumerate the frequency of 98 marketing buzzwords in current press releases.  As Sherk acknowledges, he is building upon a list David Meerman Scott compiled last year of “top gobbledygook phrases used in 2008.”

Here are the top 12 offenders:

  1. leader
  2. leading
  3. best
  4. top
  5. unique
  6. great
  7. solution
  8. largest
  9. innovative
  10. innovator
  11. award winning
  12. exclusive

Now as Gordon notes, such words are bad enough when they appear in press releases. But in content marketing, they are disastrous. As he says, “when content marketing looks like a product promotion it gets ignored like a product promotion.”

For anyone trained in B2B journalism, the terms in the above list (and the remaining 86 in Shirk’s list) are obvious no-nos. Many B2B editors cut their teeth rewriting press releases for their publication’s product and services section. Their first lesson was almost always to remove any form of endorsement language. It might not be practical to personally review products, but it was an absolute obligation to remove any promotional overtones and stick to the facts in the release, even in supplier quotes. (Sadly, as advertising has gotten scarcer, editorial standards have gotten laxer, resulting in such over-the-top quotes as—really, I did not make this up—“the outstanding part quality produced is outstanding—just awesome.”)

Though it’s been said here before,  it’s worth repeating: If content marketing is to fulfill its promise, it must adopt a journalistic ethos. That can be done through PR or marketing people learning to think like journalists, or by hiring journalists. But one way or another, it must be done.