Content Marketing is Killing Journalism

Co-Founder and Managing Editor of INDVSTRVS Joanne Leila Smith discusses why Content Marketing is highly lucrative for digital news brands yet damaging for ethical standards in Journalism – and why we all have a stake in the fall-out.

By Joanne Leila Smith

The digital publishing revolution gave unknown voices a platform to ‘speak back’ to propaganda in mainstream news.

News aggregators like Facebook and Twitter have been powerful tools for independent news to reach larger audiences with minimal capital expenditure.

Under Government pressure, organisations like Facebook are pushing back on independent media citing fake news and redirecting traffic back to legacy news brands.

The reality is legacy news brands sustained significant losses due to the rise of independent digital media, which fragmented the market. Competing for eyeballs has become a major challenge in an already hotly contested space.

The digital revolution in publishing cannot be understated. It’s important to understand why legacy news brands are increasingly viewing content marketing as the means for their survival in a digital landscape. Here’s some context:

Global newspaper advertising revenue is declining at 2.9% compounded annually
Changes in consumer expectation means readers favour free content from both digital first and traditional print publishers
In the United States alone, newspaper newsroom employees dropped by 45% within a decade
Legacy news brands invested heavily in digital, but ad revenue has not yielded corresponding growth
Content marketing is increasingly becoming the key source of revenue for many publishers, with major legacy news publishers investing heavily in content marketing businesses globally to leverage trust equity in their brands
If we want to see where Content Marketing ends – watch TV news. This is where written Journalism is headed.

Why we should care

Written journalism is the last bastion of ethical news reporting. It is the beginning and end of the entire daily news cycle, informing all channels. This is why written Journalism must be held to the highest ethical standard.

The increase in Content Marketing in Journalism has created a fall in ethical standards because publishers are now being paid to publish content or are given it free by content marketers, which creates a conflict of interest.

It is not in the publisher’s interest to fact check third party sponsored content, so we are seeing a rise in publishing disclaimers.

If we visit any news brand landing page, it is self-evident how much clickbait is juxtaposed with real news, making it hard to distinguish between editorial and advertorial.

We are increasingly seeing bloggers write outrage content – to attract a social media following – some of which are then elevated as columnists by news brands which add to the clickbait phenomenon. This legitimizes poor standards in journalism because these writers are often unqualified or are simply unaware of professional industry standards.

As digital publishing steadily erodes margins, we are seeing an increase in gated news communities which compounds partisanship, as news brands increasingly align content to targeted market segments in order to attract greater content marketing opportunities! This practice alone, makes the claim by legacy news brands to be ‘trusted’, ‘independent’ ‘balanced’ news sources clearly disingenuous.

What the public ends up buying therefore, is less transparency of sources. Less accountability of publishers. Less exposure to meaningful content and less qualified journalists. But don’t worry, we get more pay-walls. More mis-information. More advertising content and more propaganda through ‘trusted news brands’...

...to read more, visit https://indvstrvs.com/content-marketing-is-killing-journalism/