Pay to Play Content: Now Even the New York Times Knows
April 8, 2013
Mondays usually start in a predictable way. I walk the dogs. I eat a cardiologist-approved breakfast. I find out what my wife has on her list for me to do. But this morning I flipped through the New York Times, environmentally unfriendly version, and burst out laughing.
My wife asked, “What’s so funny?”
I replied, “The New York Times describes pay to play with more crazy synonyms than I thought possible.”
She asked, “And that’s humorous?”
To me it was. Navigate to these two articles. The first is on the front page of Harrod’s Creek edition and Google-crafted this way: “Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too).” The story appears in the April 8, 2013, edition which you will find in the dead tree version. My link points to a short lived version of the file on another newspaper. After a rousing quote “the dark side of open access” the story jumps to section B, page 8.
The second story appears in the business section of the same issue. Its title is “Sponsoring Articles, Not Just Ads. Branded Content on the Web Mingles with Regular Coverage.” The story features a creative graphic showing pencils held in a roll of money. (You remember. Printed money just like the early newspaper moguls collected by the horse drawn cart in the good old days of publishing.)
The point of both articles is that there are people who will pay to get their content published in a form which has some respectability. Academics pay to play in the academic journals. Companies pay to get their ideas published in a wide range of channels. The New York Times mentions Mashable, but there are many other outfits who charge money to run content. My Augmentext operation is in this business too. I suppose I could trot out the names of big publishers who offer college guides with inflated “inclusions” describing the wonders of certain college campuses. The write ups are compelling and once produced money for those who operated these quasi-reference services.
What words does the New York Times use to describe these pay to play operations? Here’s a list of some of the terms from the write up:
- Advertising
- Advertorials
- Branded content
- Campaign
- Content
- Corporate propaganda
- Native advertising
- Pure editorial
- Sponsored content
Here in Harrod’s Creek, we call content someone wants published for money:
- An inclusion
- A “pay to play” story
- POP or Plain old propaganda as defined by Jacques Ellul. If the name does not ring a bell, you can find the information in his decades old study in Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.
The professional publishing sector has been charging academics for page proofs and other services for many years. Now the practice has diffused to conferences. In my view, the use of “pay to play” methods is now part of the atmosphere and has been for decades.
I find it fascinating that the topics are now front page news from the New York Times. Perhaps “real” journalists are learning more about how the information world works.
What troubles me is that none of these questions is addressed:
- Do modern systems identify pay to play content?
- Are automated content processing systems giving equal weight to shaped content and objective content?
- Are the outputs from analytics systems manipulable?
In my proprietary report on this subject, the surprising answer is, “We just process data.”
In short, despite the huff and puff of next generation content processing system cheerleaders, the systems have what William James called “a certain blindness.” In the quest for revenues, many organizations are unwittingly conspiring to deliver information which at best is semantically swizzled and at worst weaponized. Oh, the phrase “weaponized information” does not appear in the New York Times’ stories nor in the gigabytes of words explaining the wonders of next generation analytics. Like the New York Times, the present is too much with us.
Stephen E Arnold, April 8, 2013
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