Content's Evil Twin: Advertorial

This morning, the Los Angeles Times passed yet another milestone on the road to ruin of what was once a great newspaper. When I opened it to section two (the awkwardly named “LATEXTRA”), I experienced the following sequence of thoughts:

Wow, Universal Studios burned down yesterday.
Hold on, it says “ADVERTISEMENT” above the photo.
Oh, this whole thing [...]

Wine, Roses, and Oil: PR and the Truth

Last night I happened to watch  Days of Wine and Roses, a Jack Lemmon-Lee Remick movie from 1962 that, perhaps because of the overexposed theme song, I had resisted for years.

My mistake.  It is a powerful, compelling story of an alcoholic couple whose refusal to acknowledge their alcoholism destroys their relationship. For a movie made [...]

Is Your Content Putting You at Risk?

For B2B companies embracing their new role as publishers, the content marketing community has produced a huge archive of valuable advice. There is at least one topic, however, that is rarely discussed: the legal risks and responsibilities of publishing.

The silence is understandable. Most of the time, the kind of publishing that [...]

Editors Need to Think Like Marketers

Social media may be taking over the world, but in B2B publishing, many pockets of resistance remain, particularly among editorial staff. Paul Conley has been worried about this trend for years now. As he put it in a post last year, B2B journalists have been “adopting the techniques of conversational editorial more slowly than . [...]

Ethics: Is Transparency All We Need?

For most practitioners of new-media journalism, the key to ethics is transparency. So long as you disclose all your biases and interests in what you write about, you’re OK. The rest of the traditional guidelines in which journalists have been trained are up for discussion, it seems. The latest and, to me, most mind-boggling example [...]

Editorial Ethics, Yes; Rigidity, No

I am a firm believer in a strong code of editorial ethics, as many editors who’ve worked with me would be all too quick to affirm. But I also believe that to be successful, a code of ethics must be flexible, adapting organically to the norms and expectations of different media and communities. Recent evidence [...]

Making Paying for Content More Personal

Laporte: His audience will determine his salary.

In all the discussions I’ve seen of the virtues and evils of paywalls, I have yet to see any mention of the relation of paid content to social media. This is perhaps because paying for content comes off, even to its proponents, as a kind of uncool, regrettably [...]