Hope you had a terrific turkey day (or non-turkey day, as we prefer)! Don’t cause or get into any accidents at the malls today, okay?
Talking with a writer chum last week, the topic of conflicts of interest came up. His client, a PR firm, wanted placement of an article in a publication (and they didn’t seem to be too picky). They wanted him to write it and sell it to a magazine. They were fine with him getting paid by them to farm it out and paid by the magazine for writing it. He wasn’t. See, in journalistic terms, it’s called a conflict of interest and it’s unethical. Not even hinting at unethical – it’s blatantly so.
Writers cannot and should not EVER collect two checks for one piece of work, especially when one party has no idea it’s happening. It’s like selling your car to two different people and hoping the second person to show up doesn’t mind. Any self-respecting magazine would turn down such a piece and ban the writer from ever contacting them again. Magazines expect their content to be balanced representations of situations, issues, trends, and conflicts. If you were to work for Acme Company and write articles that claimed Acme’s products were the best ever, without telling anyone, you’d be cheating readers out of a fair representation and you’d be damaging the reputation of the publication that expected an unbiased story.
You cannot serve two masters. If loyalty can be bought and two opposing sides are buying it, imagine what magazines would look like – full of advertorials and content framed to make one company look like gods in their industry.
But people are expecting it. PR people who are either too young or too foolish to understand often think this is okay. Some pseudo-magazines try to pass off their “editorial” as real articles when in fact the articles are biased. I wrote for one once. The editor wouldn’t let me use any sources beyond their advertisers and wanted no “negative” representation. So in other words, they wanted me to lie. Their new editor tried like hell to get them to run balanced pieces, but they ran him out of town just as quickly as they did their writers.
Have you come across this? What’s your take on it?
Lori,
I've never encountered anything like this, but I agree it's a conflict of interest.
You'd be surprised how many people don't see it as such, Lillie. Maybe I'm getting too old, but I remember when people would be outraged at this type of arrangment. Now it's becoming commonplace among PR firms.
I quit a magazine gig when they told me I could only mention their sponsors/affiliates/advertisers in my articles. In fact, I HAD to mention them.
By my definition, that's writing an advertorial, not an article. Different genre, different pay scale than an article.
No thanks.
When I did more business writing, I ran into a couple of publications that insisted their advertisers be prominently features as sources. They gave me a list culled directly from their sales department!
I always sought out some of my own sources. The better editors there left those in. But they were soon replaced by a couple of sycophants whose noses were shoved so far up the publisher's posterior that they would re-write decent articles to focus on their advertisers. More than once I wanted my name removed from the final edit. As soon as I realized these idiots were always going to totally rework my articles in order to suck up to their advertisers, I stopped writing for them.