New guidelines from the American Society of Magazine Editors about the relationship between commercial and editorial last Wednesday smacked of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. Some of Asme’s biggest members already allow journalists to produce content for advertisers despite it being previously verboten.
Asme’s changes, which ended a bar on cover ads and jettisoned an admirably simple edict – “Don’t ask editors to write ads” – underline the difficulties of a trade organisation keeping up with a media industry under pressure to do business in new and possibly dubious ways. The challenges are coming so thick and fast it sometimes feels that no one, in any country, is getting this relationship right.
At one end of the scale we have the Telegraph, the once venerable paper still reeling from allegations made by departed columnist Peter Oborne that it committed a “form of fraud” on its readers by allowing advertisers such as HSBC to control the content written by an increasingly beleaguered editorial staff.
Related: Peter Oborne: advertising is consumerist sewage
But earlier this month, BuzzFeed, some years from venerable and whose growth has been almost as fast as the speed with which one of its cat videos goes viral, got caught in a mess of its own making by deleting articles that criticised two advertisers – Dove and Hasbro. “Ha!”, you could almost hear old media journalists snort – those teenagers have even less respect for the time-honoured church and state separation than us.
Much of the criticism over digital ventures such as Vice and Vox has centred on the way they display and create native advertising. This time, the controversy involved two articles about BuzzFeed advertisers that had been deleted in a way that contradicted the site’s own editorial standards and ethics guide, published this January. As Gawker, which broke the story, pointed out, BuzzFeed has previous when it comes to taking down posts critical of advertisers. The removal of two stories made even the site’s staunchest supporters uncomfortable. And yet, nothing has underlined the difference between the BuzzFeed and Telegraph stories, or indeed pointed to the transparency needed to deal with these kinds of events, as much as the way the news organisations responded to the criticism. Not the note to staff sent out by BuzzFeed Life editors Peggy Wang and Emily Fleischaker within a few hours of the Gawker article suggesting that their decision to remove the articles related to an editorial desire to “show not tell”. That move away from something BuzzFeed management delight in calling “hot takes” was instantly mocked by rivals who pointed out lots of similar stories remained on the website and told a lot without showing. It was more the reaction of editor-in-chief Ben Smith, who tweeted that he “blew it” by deleting the articles. Within 24 hours of the criticism, both articles, one of which was written by former Daily Telegraph assistant comment editor Tom Chivers, were back online under this statement: “This post was inappropriately deleted amid an ongoing conversation about how and when to publish personal opinion pieces on BuzzFeed. The deletion was in violation of our editorial standards and the post has been reinstated.”
Is BuzzFeed going to face more questions about its editorial integrity? Of course. In an age in which everything we write, tweak and delete can be detected, every news organisation will. Yet Smith, whether fine-tuning editorial judgments separating news and features as he says, or reacting to an advertiser which didn’t like the criticism (which he denies), has at least fessed up to a mistake and made a change. It did not stop the author of the Dove piece, Arabelle Sicardi, from resigning but in a fast-changing world transparency must be the route to integrity. Smith mucked up but deserves the benefit of the doubt this once, given he moved quickly and admitted it.
The Telegraph’s response to the criticism from Oborne and other former staff members anonymously was to refuse to apologise for its pro-business editorial stance, criticise its detractors on other papers (including this one), and to promise new editorial guidelines which are a “work in progress” on how staff should work with commercial. It might be easy to see the difference between these reactions as the difference between old and new media. A better decision, given the importance of the issue, is between good and bad. No media organisation is failsafe and everyone makes mistakes. Decisions about why such a story gets written or promoted, changed or dropped are made constantly under all sorts of pressures, not just commercial ones. In the US, editorial code makers are trying to draw a line. In the UK, the editors’ code gives no overt protection to journalists from commercial pressure. Yet allowing advertisers to use future revenues as a bait to dictate editorial is not the way to survive but to die faster.