The content farm company is now trying to buy the original Forbes company.
So when our media companies become small subsidiaries of affiliate content farms then yea I think it’s a bit disturbing.
Sure, the mere fact that the news is no longer news, is old news. But how and why it is happening is big and un-reported news.
When six companies control 90% of the news outlets, that is unprecedented concentration and loss of the diverse viewpoints necessary for a robust society.
When those corporations which normally sell-off any lossmaking division instead hold loss-making 'news' divisions in a now-chronically lossmaking industry, the payoff is not some potential future profits; the payoff is in influencing public opinion to favor policies advantageous to your larger corporation.
So, of course the how and why it is happening is unreported by the organizations that are making it happen.
This isn’t wrong but let me put a finer point on it: when BigCompany Inc starts dumping sludge into your town’s lake, you need independent journalists to figure that out. Corporate talking heads aren’t going to do that. And certainly not the people running a link farm.
What news is reported is as important as whether the facts are true. The easiest path to propaganda is to simply report other, more convenient, facts.
Now, they’ve decided to cash out that trust by lending their names to sleazy content farming affiliate marketer types.
For now, that’s valuable, since people (and Google) trust the names based on what they used to do—and they distrust the rest of the endless chorus of hucksters. But sooner or later, the world realizes there’s no longer good reason to trust those names. They’re just snake oil (and CBD gummy) salesmen like the rest.
And then we’re left without popular institutions that are trustworthy when we need to understand complicated and true things about the world. And we’ve punished people (and Google) for even trying to place more weight on honest reportage and institutional signals of expertise.
Traditional newspapers would get stories from things like AP, and then the editors would decide what to run. They’d also have reporters that wrote local stories, etc.
I’d argue that any news site that has eliminated all those roles is already out of business and is simply burning down their brand at this point.
Even reporters have left me. Savannah Guthrie, she has left the White House press corps to host the Today show. Norah O’Donnell left the briefing room to host CBS This Morning. Jake Tapper left journalism to join CNN.That's also why they publish only a couple of stories per day instead of hundreds, why they never cover breaking news, why there's a donate button (as opposed to now-standard paywalls), why there's no ads, why the interface appears cleaner etc. If we were talking about tech companies, it'd be like comparing Wikimedia/Mozilla/Internet Archive to traditional for-profit tech companies. To an untrained eye there is no difference, but a somewhat trained eye quickly realises that their incentives are completely different.
(Disclaimer: I work for a different non-profit investigative journalism organization.)
Yes. ProPublica is biased to look in certain directions. Every single reporter, editor, publisher, is biased in this way. The answer to this is more, not less.
FIRE rose from decisions the ACLU took about representing cases. This is a fundamentally good thing, speaking as a diehard ACLU supporter.
Speaking as a huge fan of ProPublica, I'm hoping that they're investigating all of the supreme court justices (for example), because we won't pass laws to reign in judicial corruption without bipartisan action. But if they aren't, I desperately hope that there's a market for a conservative-focus investigative outfit that can stick to the facts like ProPublica.
¹ https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/fashion/best-leggings-on...
² https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/pet-insurance/best-..., https://www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/money/best-pet-insurance
Sample sections from advisor:
- Cheap Car Insurance
- Pet Insurance
- How Much Is Pet Insurance?
- Cheap Pet Insurance
Under health, they have a sub-section “best cbd gummies”. I clicked on a few articles and they’re outsourced(?) amazon affiliate spam that claims Forbes actually tested the products.
The health section is served from forbes.com, but the navigation is different and includes a “back to forbes.com” button.
In some other parts of forbes.com they have clear disclaimers, like:
Innovation -> SAP Brand Voice | Paid program
So, they’re definitely trying to pass off the marketplace content as legitimate news sections.
At the top of the page I see an Advertising Disclosure link. After that I see a byline for the actual human freelancer that wrote the article.
After that I see a huge call-out that "Commissions we earn from partner links on this page do not affect our opinions or evaluations. Our editorial content is based on thorough research and guidance from the Forbes Health Advisory Board".
Below that is a "Featured Partner Offer" with an info popover that reads "Partner Offers feature brands who paid Forbes Health to appear at the top of our list. While this may influence where their products or services appear on our site, it in no way affects our ratings, which are based on thorough research, solid methodologies and expert advice. Our partners cannot pay us to guarantee favorable reviews of their products or services". The offer contains no rating or editorial text.
Below that are the reviewed items, which have ratings and editorial text. Some of the text is linked to full reviews of specific products (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/health/cbd/cbdfx-gummies-review/).
Below that is the methodology: "To determine the best CBD gummies, the Forbes Health editorial team analyzed data on over 100 CBD gummy products ... then ranked the CBD gummies based on price, potency, flavor options available and whether its ingredients are all natural, organic, gluten-free and/or vegan-friendly." They don't claim to have tested all of them.
Again, this looks like 90% of the other review pages on the web, including things Forbes already publishes (e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/article..., https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/article...).
90% of websites are not in the top 10% of mainstream media big budget brand reputation... so if the top 10% look like the other 90%, that says something, and it's not good.
How free* media works. The media landscape has sadly divided into assuming only those who can pay for news want to be informed or have their views challenged. The poor get ads and echo chambers.
Contractor-written slop at these content farms, as described by TFA, have nothing in common with how content works at The New Yorker.
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/the-new-yorker-jumps-into...
While it’s good more people understand the business of news, this is all out in the open and has been for years.
Now, to be clear, I'm not exactly excusing CNN for this, but literally for years now I've rolled my eyes at the extremely spammy/low quality/clickbait ads that have appeared on CNN articles online. The fact that they've outsourced part of their "Underscored" site, which isn't exactly journalism to begin with, is not something I care about. And in case you missed it, journalism has had a blood bath over the past 25 years. While I think what CNN is doing in terms of affiliate ads is scammy, can I really blame them? Hardly anyone wants to pay for journalism these days, but journalists still want to eat. At least with these clickbait ads I find them so low quality that they don't confuse me into being "real" articles.
This seems to be a case of knowledge without context being a dangerous thing in the wrong hands.
It looks like you mean: "Let me break down how a certain portion of the media industry that I'm familiar with works."
"The media industry" is vast, complex, diverse, and far more interesting than internet content farms, poorly-run legacy brands, or even most of what's on the internet.
"Site reputation abuse is when third-party pages are published with little or no first-party oversight or involvement, where the purpose is to manipulate search rankings by taking advantage of the first-party site's ranking signals. Such third-party pages include sponsored, advertising, partner, or other third-party pages that are typically independent of a host site's main purpose or produced without close oversight or involvement of the host site."
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-po...
That's why it's all hush-hush within the industry.
I think a much more simple answer is that syndication has always been hush-hush because branding and brand trust is a key part of media marketing. Your local newspaper in the 90s had a ton of syndicated stories too but it was all published under your local paper's hometown moniker.
Certainly as a kid/teen, I didn’t understand it; I suspect plenty of adults didn’t either.
That aside, I'm not sure the assertion about 90s papers is accurate. There was syndication, of course, but that was attributed. Let's say there were articles written by other people published under the names of local writers. That sounds theoretically possible, but something that'd be well known. Let's say there were articles attributed to the paper at large. I don't recall that.
> The average American reader didn’t necessarily notice the way syndicates and chains had come to dominate the news. Syndicates were careful to sell their material to only one newspaper per city. While syndicated features usually carried a small copyright symbol, the name that followed that symbol could be deliberately opaque. Readers wouldn’t automatically know that “King Features” denoted Hearst material, or that “NEA” indicated content from the Scripps chain. Local papers sometimes purposely disguised syndicated material. The Milwaukee Sentinel bought a comic strip from the New York World syndicate in 1918, for example, but retitled it “Somewhere in Milwaukee.” The same paper told readers to send in their letters for Dorothy Dix as though she could be reached in Milwaukee, and not in New York City, where she lived and sold her work to the Ledger syndicate.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-syndicated-column...
Local newspapers didn't want to plainly advertise that a gigantic chunk of their content came from thousands of miles away. It undermines their value proposition.
Likewise, CNN probably likes that a huge chunk of featured content on their page is driving them revenue but doesn't look like a big ad to their audience.
https://pressgazette.co.uk/comment-analysis/national-press-b...
And under work-for-hire arrangements, putting your name on something that someone else wrote is not even necessarily incorrect, either. Not every case of reprinting stories in a newspaper is a big reputable newspaper printing a story by a big reputable news syndicate who is licensing the story to multiple customers.
I write copyrighted material all day, but since it is for hire, the person who has hired me owns the copyright to it, and puts their name on my work. And US law provides no right for me to be attributed.
I appreciate the criticism of CNN in this case, but I just don't think this is somehow an egregious outlier in the history of media practices.
There was no name underneath the short. Just AP, Reuters or whatever. It was pretty clear.
Moreso this (at the time) was literal school content on media literacy. High school english classes would _get newspapers_ in order to talk about the different types of articles and content.
They are presenting content as their own under questionable sources that they don't reveal. It proves they are being less genuine when doing so makes them money.
They sell stories to other news outlets to publish on their own website.
In traditional journalism using wire stories (or "curated content partners"), the publisher (Forbes, CNN, etc.) pays for the content.
In the case of CNN Underscore, the "content partners" are paying CNN to use their good name to peddle advertorial content. Like if I want to run a cryptocurrency scam, I can pay CNN or Forbes to run a story on their website touting the benefits of my fake product. To a non-observant reader, it will appear to actually be coming from CNN or Forbes.
This is a long way from CNN running something from the Associated Press or Reuters.
Most media organizations have a small number of in-house journalists on verticals that make sense.
The rest of the content is curated and brought in from content partners and written outside of the news organization.
In practice they function more like a social media feed than traditional newspapers. I’m no fan of CNN, but this isn’t exactly a scandal, media had to adapt to keep up with so much being on social media these days, they all do this.