Ed has a serious love/hate relationship with advertisements. Love: ads make it possible for magazines to exist. Hate: ads pay for space, which enables magazines to exist. So Ed started wondering if those producing the editorial content “owe” something to those paying the big bucks for ads. In an ideal world with unfaltering journalistic integrity the answer would be no, but sometimes it seems that ads have more say in editorial content than we’d like. Don’t get Ed wrong, he has high journalistic morals and knows you do as well, but has seen how ads can affect editorial content.
Ed’s heard from his friends how ads can drive editorial content – sometimes in a subtle way, sometimes is a major way. For example, one of Ed’s friends was recently told that a certain brand had to be included in a list of travel accommodations for a feature, and another friend who works in digital was told that coverage of a certain person had to be taken off the homepage during an advertiser’s presence – yikes, this all sounds pretty editorially invasive to Ed. Furthermore, do editors even have a say or choice in the matter?
So with ads sometimes (hopefully a very small percentage of the time!) affecting editorial content, Ed’s wondering if this will only increase with the current state of dwindling ad pages. All media hounds are talking about these days are the lack of ad pages and thinner issues, which Ed thinks might pump up ad-driven content. What do you think – have you experienced ads creeping into editorial content, do you think the sparse amount of ad pages will affect this even more, and can editors say no to this pressure? Seriously, Ed wants to know what you think.
– Ed
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2 comments:
I wrote a paper about this for a class last year, focusing on how unfortunate it is that its near impossible to truly trust a magazine's content these days since its so biased by advertising. Unfortunately, I don't think there's any going back. At the end of the day, everyone wants to make money and there's no way anyone is going to turn down a major advertiser's requests.
I recently left my job at a trade magazine, and I have to say that much of the content was driven by advertising, from the front-of-the-book pieces to the features. We had to make sure that almost all of our advertisers were cited somewhere in our editorial content, or risk the wrath of an adveriser. When I was tasked with writing a feature, I was given a laundry list of advertisers that had to be included. And even if I was halfway through writing the piece, my editor wouldn't hesitate to tell me that one more had to be included or another had to be taken out because he/she didn't advertise. The same went for the front-of-the-book pieces as well. The only leeway we had was in our daily online newsletter, where sometimes the biggest stories of the day weren't necessarily focused on advertisers. The whole experience was disheartening and definitely not what I thought my first full-time magazine job was going to be like.
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