Drawing the Line Between News and Content Marketing is Key to Publisher Credibility and Success
Publishers invest significant time and financial resources in building their audience. No one has the right to have their content placed in front of the audience you’ve built. Public relations firms and others say their content is newsworthy and they get paid a lot of money to try to make that case to publishers every day. Drawing the line between news and public relations and critical to publisher credibility and success in the years ahead. There are still many in the industry who feel there needs to be a wall between editorial and advertising. The truth is that publications are businesses and rather than maintain a wall, there instead needs to be thoughtful line-drawing between news and marketing, combined with transparency for the reader.
Publishers are bombarded by public relations firms and others seeking news coverage for their clients. In most cases, these are thinly disguised attempts to obtain marketing services from you at no charge while the client pays a boatload of money to the public relations firm. Their goal is to get their event and/or client published — and it doesn’t go through the same editorial lens publishers and reporters have. Publishers and editors need to think critically when approached with such requests for coverage. They should ask themselves the following questions:
1) Is this truly newsworthy or is it really marketing? If it is marketing, the inquiry should end here and your sales team should contact them about marketing in your publication.
2) If it is newsworthy, is it relevant for your audience? For example, if you are a local news publisher and the request is newsworthy but about a national topic or a vertical unrelated to local news, it is time to turn the request over to your sales team.
3) If it is newsworthy and it is relevant to your audience, you then need to decide if it is newsworthy enough to warrant having a reporter cover the story. For example, if your publication is invited to attend the weekly Rotary club meeting, it arguably is newsworthy and relevant to your audience if you are a local news publisher, but should you be devoting reporter resources to cover it? This too may be a situation to turn over to your sales team if you feel the newsworthiness of the topic does not rise to the level of deserving news coverage in your publication. For example, perhaps the organization should pay for publication of a press release or event announcement for their meeting?
Once you have analyzed these questions and made your editorial decision, it is critical that if you have decided it is not newsworthy enough to devote a reporter to cover, any content marketing sold by your sales team to that entity is labeled as Sponsored Content. Readers need to trust that when they are reading your news coverage, it is truly objective reporting, and other content they see is transparent regarding its intention. Too often, to fill pages or their website with content, publishers intermingle true news stories with paid-for public relations without disclosure, which eradicates credibility with the reader. Readers may not know where the news coverage ends and the content marketing begins. This undermines the hard work of publications that are carefully vetting newsworthiness and properly labeling paid content. Not to mention, it also gives, in many instances, media a bad name.
Done the right way, publishers can provide meaningful original news reporting while enabling public relations firms and others to speak directly to their audience through paid content marketing that is transparent to readers. It takes thoughtfulness and it is time-consuming, but can lead to both financial success and credibility as a media outlet.
