Scooter mechanic, once homeless, says cheap rides now help him pay rent

Re:Scooter mechanic, once homeless, says cheap rides now hel... by PhasmaFelis on Monday December 10, 2018 @09:33AM (#18648135)

In your linked post, you seem to be saying "Everyone knows that positive articles are usually PR, you don't need to point it out."

Everyone doesn't know that. You know it because you were an ad exec. Educating people who aren't yet sufficiently cynical about stealth advertising is a valuable goal.

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Re:Scooter mechanic, once homeless, says cheap rides now hel... by ubercow13 on Monday December 10, 2018 @10:25AM (#18648516)

Yes, if anything they should be the one trying to spread the knowledge. The fact that they are doing the opposite leads me to suspect their comments are Submarine Comments of the PR industry.

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Re:Scooter mechanic, once homeless, says cheap rides now hel... by CPLX on Monday December 10, 2018 @01:47PM (#18650181)

It's not stealth advertising. The SF Chronicle is a legitimate news organization that has journalistic standards.

Maybe a PR person suggested the story, maybe nobody did. Maybe the author came up with the idea and just wrote it. Maybe the author emailed around looking for examples and a PR person jumped on the idea. Who fucking knows. But nobody in this thread has any first hand info about it.

Either way it's not advertising, it's a story in the newspaper by a journalist that has ethical standards to live up to. We live in an era now where people are trying to blur the difference between ads and journalism, for a reason, so I personally care about the difference.

Also the word submarine is fucking stupid.

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