I have now rewritten this column three times. Every time I try I end up covering too much ground and just rambling. This is the last shot. In the past few months I have been involved in a number of conversations and situations that all forced the same basic question: What is news?
The easy answer is to quote Reuven Frank, the one-time head of NBC news who said, "NEWS is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising." That statement is at once overly broad, confrontational, outmoded and completely true. And smart marketers both know and take advantage of it. The line between news and advertising has become increasingly blurred. What started as ads in newspapers that were designed to look just like the stories they were running next to has led to things like network news anchors doing "stories" that have a tenuous news peg but do a great job of promoting a new show on their network. And as that has happened, the public has developed an ever-greater disdain for both advertising and journalism. (I saw a poll a few years back that ranked occupations by how much people trusted those who practiced them. Journalists came in near the bottom–just above used car salesmen.)
Given that the public is so jaded, advertisers often seek to get a message across by hiding it in something that doesn't look like an ad–a kind of extension on the "ad that looks like a news story" referenced above. Example: When Arnold Schwarzenegger was running for governor in California there was a brief controversy when it was alleged that a number of companies had contributed to his campaign in exchange for "product placement" in his ads and public appearances. In other words, he drank a certain soft drink in public and in his TV ads and his campaign was "thanked" by the company that makes and markets that soft drink.
Or this: When I drive to the office every day I pass a large billboard for a Las Vegas club called Rum Jungle. The image is of an attractive woman in a lowcut top playing a set of congas. Next to the image is the phrase "Frequent Fire." (The sign is right next to the airport and the club features intense pyro. It's a pun.) In the past week or so I have noticed a change in the sign. It now appears as if a tagger has crossed out the Frequent Fire phrase and put the words "nice bongos" above the woman–a pretty obvious reference.
But is it vandalism or PR? Look closely and it is obvious that the "graffiti" was always under a layer of the sign that was removed to make it look like tagging. The idea is that more people will take notice of and remember a sign that has been humorously defaced than will take note of the original ad. Similar approaches to advertising are common–especially in the world of trade publishing.
There are the really blatant examples like the time a gear company's ad buyer said they had to get cover placement in FOH because another magazine had given them a package that included an ad, a review and the cover all for one price. That is called "selling editorial" and I think it sucks and hurts everyone in the industry. But it happens in big and small ways every day.
Most of the ways this trend affects the pro audio trade press (and you, the readers) are less clear. Like this: gear manufacturers pitch us stories every day about gigs, tours, installs and new products. Truth is, we could not publish FOH without their help. No trade publisher could possibly afford the staff it would take to come up with all of the content themselves. The problem comes when the "articles" pitched to us are little more than glorified ads or, worse, contain statements that are more hyperbole than fact.
Our job has increasingly become to act as a kind of filter–to get the "good stuff" in and filter out the BS. While we edit out as much of the BS as we can and try to either kill or verify statements that contain words like "only", "best", "first" or a host of others, we have been burned a few times recently when we let a claim like this slip into the pages of FOH or onto the Web site only to be called on it by someone else (usually a pissed off reader or another manufacturer) with additional information that puts a different spin on things.
As trade publishers, we occupy a middle ground in that we have to earn the trust of both our readers (who trust us to give them the real story) and our advertisers (who trust us to get the news–and their ads–to a group of people who are interested in their products). It used to be that simple, but the brutal competition for limited ad dollars has resulted in statements like one I got in an email just the other day that said if FOH wanted advertising from a certain company we had to "earn it" by printing major pieces featuring their product. My reply was less than cordial.
Will things change? Not on our end. We will continue to put you, the readers, first. Let's face facts, if we don't have you, we don't have anything. We hope those in the advertising community who don't seem to get it come to realize that is the best thing we can do for them as well. E-mail me (bevans@fohonline. com), or head on over to the Wild and Wooly forums online (www.fohonline.com/forum) if you want to get in on the discussion.
