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Not a week goes by when we don't get a call from a company who wants to get their content onto Newsvine. Usually, it's quite benevolent.
- A local newspaper wants us to pull their RSS feed and auto-publish it into the correct geographic section on our site.
- An entertainment gossip site wants to publish their stories to our entertainment section.
Under the right circumstances, if such a source published regular content which was better than the AP Wire (for instance, in Entertainment or in an international region), we would definitely explore doing a deal, and you can expect this sort of thing moving forward.
However, several days ago a company approached us with what we thought was a strange proposition:
"We are interested in syndicating our articles to your site and paying you to publish them online.", the initial e-mail said.
Paying us to publish articles. It sounded a little strange. Nevertheless, we agreed to a phone conversation to satisfy our curiosity. Turns out this company is fairly large and their articles appear in many major newspapers and online news sites. They are clearly of value to someone.
Not wanting to waste any time, we asked them during the opening moments of the call exactly how they operated and exactly why they wanted to pay us to publish their content. The answer surprised the hell out of us:
It turns out that companies (for instance, *insert mega electronics store here*) pay this company to write articles about their industry and sprinkle quotes from their employees and executives throughout. An example would be an article about the hottest new electronic gadgets people are buying during the holiday season. The article is professionally written -- with a very newsy slant -- and then a quote from an executive at *insert mega electronics store here* says something like "We've noticed at most of our urban stores that music devices really seem to be the hot item this year."
Whoa!
It's like journalism payola! Are people aware that this goes on? We certainly weren't. And we're not talking about a small operation here. We were pointed to multiple major online news sites and traditional newspapers that publish this stuff. The idea is that the more pages you can put in a newspaper (or on a news site), the more ads you can run, so newspapers are glad to add to their page count.
You can see where this benefits the companies who pay these faux-journalism outfits. They get articles written about products they sell and they get their company name inserted by way of quotations. You can also see where the faux-journalism outfits benefit. They are paid large sums of money to write and distribute this stuff. And you can also see where the end publisher benefits. More content equals more ads. But where does this leave readers? We all know that there is usually an "angle" behind everything we read online, in print, and anywhere else, but is it okay if the angle is the explicit payment by a company to essentially "synthesize" an article with the intent of passing it off as journalism?
The whole thing tasted wrong to us on many different levels so we politely declined the proposal. We told them that if we expected Newsvine users to follow the Code of Honor, we needed to follow it ourselves... particularly the part about not posting promotional material.
But the fact remains -- there are major news sources running this stuff and barely anybody knows about it. We're not here to point fingers or name names. We just want our readers to know that a) this stuff exists, and b) you will not find it on Newsvine.
