Ethics Doesn’t Require Blindness: Breaking Down the Barrier Between Editorial and Ads
Posted in: Uncategorized
“We don’t need journalists solving the problem of news,” Michael Wolff wrote recently in USA Today. “We need people with far more cunning and inventive commercial minds. But there are few of those.” I rarely agree with what Wolff has to say, but alas, with these lines he’s right.
Rarely do you see an industry where the creators of the product — that is, journalists and editors — are so unexposed to how that product is marketed and sold. Somewhere along the line, a wall went up between the newsroom and the business side of journalism. If reporters and editors got engaged in the business side, the thinking went, the news might become tainted and readers couldn’t trust it. Separation of church and state became the rallying cry; it was a matter of professional ethics. And we were left with an army of journalists who had no connection to the business model of their industry. They had no clue what their most important source of income (advertisers, that is, not readers) wanted.
Post a Comment