Fast-forward from an uncomfortable relationship over the last century, public relations now manifests itself in almost every journalistic publication in the millennial generation, especially pertinent in the print sector. More so, print journalism has had an equally sore relationship with its readership, a rapport that has broken down through breakthrough technology (you know, that thing called the Internet) and diverging consumer habits.

Journalism is no longer PR’s advisory, and has pretty much admitted defeat. We’ve witnessed journalism thrive, or at least revive financially through an insurgence of PR influence; they say money doesn’t equal happiness, but then again, neither does being unemployed. The publishing tightrope is especially tricky in these unusually uncertain times: too many hard-hitting facts means your content is ‘too hard’ and you’re out of business; complete subservience to revenue streams and you’re nothing more than putty in the hands of PR.

The digital industry hasn’t got off scot-free either. PR has flexed its muscle here as elsewhere.

One of the ways in which PR and journalism have rekindled their relationship is by extending the practice of paid-for editorials. By no means entirely new, they used to stick out a mile (and people would pass right over them); but now, carefully threaded between your weekly column and showbiz gossip, the ‘advertorial’ has become the epitome of ingenious advertising. At first glance, nothing looks out of place. Either as a written piece or video short, the advert is designed to look native, natural and enriching to the publication. The best example is BBC’s Good Food, which now includes extensive collection of Co-op-augmented foodie guides. Although brilliantly crafted, and actually rather informative, there’s a catch: the perfect cheeseboard you are encouraged to create, is comprised of entirely of cheeses purchased exclusively at the Co-op.

I now know that the three month cave-aged Wookey Hole Cheddar has a deep complex flavour (the moisture levels and temperature in the caves are particularly conducive to it). I also know where to buy it, and I am even less likely to show an interest in other cave-matured cheeses which I might possibly have purchased some place else.

You get what you click on; and there’s a price to be paid.

You Tube is another prime site for viewing the changing balance of forces between PR and journalism. Thousands of YouTube personalities across the Internet are top targets for advertorial injections. ‘YouTubers’ are the millennial celebrities, and a generation of adoring fans tune in to watch, and be influenced by, their videos every day. Product placement seems to be the biggest hit. Top 10 product lists littered across the Internet are more than often rigged, and reviews can be heavily skewed by commercial obligations.

A particular example involves YouTube personality ‘Anna Akana’. After being accused of ‘selling out’ to advertising brands such as Audible and clothing line Ghost and Stars, she received negative criticism – sometimes amounting to death threats. Her response was as follows:

“If a sell out is someone who puts high value on their work, then sure. If a sell out is someone who recognizes that money frees up your time to work on non-paying passion projects, awesome! If a sell out is someone who loves what they do, but also wants to make a living at it, then yeah, call her a sell out.”

It would be hypocritical to finger point, though. At one stage or another I bet every professional journalist has relaxed his or her moral and ethical commitments to the public in order to stay in the job.

The ‘truth’ is no longer important in millennial media. The Guardian estimates that 75% of entertainment stories, and 50 to 80% of news and business stories emanate from public relations – which doesn’t mean they are not true, but it does mean these are truths constructed and disseminated for promotional purposes. Other studies put the figure as high as 98%; the stats are overwhelming.

The real ‘truth’ is that almost everything you read, and every opinion you formulate, is partly because it was designed to be so. Of course, journalism by design isn’t a new phenomenon. From early Nazi propaganda to the political influence of the red tops, the spirit of editorial independence – supposedly without fear or favour, has always been used and abused.

It seems as though public relations will live on, with or without journalism. But it is scary to think that in 20 years’ time a publication you now trust for its editorial independence could be not much more than a saturated Argos catalogue.

Sources

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/nov/17/mondaymediasection3

http://londonprogressivejournal.com/article/view/1246

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/native/guide-cheese-how-make-perfect-cheeseboard

http://qz.com/419424/watch-popular-youtuber-explains-why-she-sold-out/

Slaving away at a big-time news cooperation may be your cup of tea, but to some aspiring journalists making the tea may not be enough.

On the other hand, how else can we begin to make a living, when many independent publications are unable to pay their way?

In 2014, a record-breaking 581,173 UK businesses were registered with Companies House, while 238,000 crashed out. The report by startups.co.uk found that the trend for failing businesses sloped by 6 per cent. In layman’s terms, 59 per cent of all businesses in the UK have survived.

Journalistic ventures, however, don’t.

Survival is Success, published by Reuters, found that the publications they examined across three countries ‘struggled to break-even’. So why do start-ups in journalism perform so poorly? The Reuters report explains that there are two particularly important challenges that start-ups face. The first is that income from online revenue is far lower than it was many years ago, and declines even more when millions of websites saturate the market each year. But the second point, which is my major concern here, is that the competition from the legacy market is much, much too fierce.

‘The market for online news continues to be dominated by legacy media organisations,’ Reuters continue, ‘which have leveraged their existing resources and well-known brands to draw audiences and generate revenues’.

Effectively, the big guns (News Corp, News UK etc) can pay to smother smaller publications using high-cost ad campaigns to bully the print and digital shelf-space into submission. Leading by example, Rupert Murdoch-controlled News Corp bought-out a UK-based video ad tech firm, Unruly, for $176 million this year. The company has the ability to monitor and predict viral ads and correctly channel ad-spend into the fastest-growing areas of multimedia. It’s a dog eat dog world, after all.

Thankfully, one Australian start-up has found a way to produce and fund content that doesn’t fit into predictable boxes.

The Typewriter, founded by University of New South Wales student Benjamin Cheung, is a platform designed for ‘global citizen journalism’. Content is submitted from several countries and is written in several languages. Cheung claims the site to have a unique following of 200,000, generating 800,000 hits per month. Although a mere stripling in comparison to the Guardian‘s 1,077,000 readers, The Typewriter has managed to sustain itself by publishing free, user-submitted material.

Cheung remarks, however, that revenue is not prioritised and instead ‘the major focus for the company is building the platform and growing its user base’.

Elsewhere, most independent start-ups focus on finding and exploiting the ‘gap’ in the market. But what happens when the enemy fills these cracks?

UsVsTh3m (or Us Versus Them) was a project developed in May 2013 by British tabloid the Mirror, which translates mainstream media for niche audiences. Topics such as the general election were made attractive for teens using ‘memes’ and ‘awesome’ language and articles such as ‘The list of the nation’s favourite biscuits is making the Internet angry’ and ‘How obeying the law will no longer be enough to protect you from the police’ made front-page stories.

This ‘more digestible’ approach to journalism was such a success that the Mirror now publishes the content to its own website. Along with comparably focused in-house brand, Ampp3d, which was released shortly after the success of UsVsTh3m, these sites have been credited with the Mirror’s remarkable growth between 2013 and 15, more-than-tripling their online readership from 1.2 to 3.8 million.

The move, however, is paper-thin. Following the announcement of domain repositioning, angry and confused users lashed out. Apparently, UsVsTh3m readers hate the Mirror.

‘I think I’ll pass. After a year of coming to UsVsTh3m, it’s disappointing to hear,’ said one distraught follower. ‘That’s me done with this site, sorry guys,’ said another. In a further turn of events, the Mirror announced that the ‘new formats’ team would loose 27 jobs, with both sites facing the axe. Seems like they have managed to pull failure out of previously successful developments.

As evident, legacy media can’t always fill a gap in the market. While undisputedly effective at what they do, they can’t have it both ways. They can’t be the majority and minority.

UK comedian and activist Russell Brand is a perfect example of what the anti-mass wants. Produced, directed and starring Brand, The Trews is an online medium published to YouTube, ‘telling you how it is’. It’s heavy on anti-austerity and anti-establishment; everything legacy media is not. Each 10 minute short was completely free to consume, and although capturing 1.2 million subscribers, and amassing over 113 million video hits, The Trews was sadly cut short in August for Brand to focus on other ventures.

While it’s possible The Trews was successful only because it was fronted by Brand, it surely opens up a range of possibilities for like-minded entrepreneurs. So be inventive. Be creative. But most importantly, don’t be satisfied with what’s in the Mirror.

Links:

http://startups.co.uk/start-up-business-record-smashed-in-2014/

http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Survival%20is%20Success%20Journalistic%20Online%20Start-Ups%20in%20Western%20Europe_0.pdf

http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/06/citizen-journalism-startup-typewriter-needs-decide-revenue-strategy-survive-harsh-australian-media-landscape/

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/13/trinity-mirrors-usvsth3m-and-ampp3d-thought-to-be-facing-axe-as-jobs-set-to-go

http://www.mirror.co.uk/usvsth3m/

http://www.digitalstrategyconsulting.com/intelligence/2015/09/news_corp_buys_unruly_for_176m_to_boost_ad_tech.php

http://usvsth3m.com/post/usvsth3m-has-moved-but-dont-panic

http://www.mirror.co.uk/usvsth3m/

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/ampp3d/

It’s official – vanity has gone viral, and it’s a killer disease. In the Evening Standard Phoebe Luckhurst relays that more than 12 people have died in 2015 as a result of impromptu selfies and melodramatic pouts. That’s four more fatalities than sharks, she adds, because we’re playing the inconsequential comparisons game.

But let’s get serious. Is it our own narcissism that is killing the conversation (and ourselves, by the looks of things); or the technology that we hold so dear?

On average, we post over 80 million pictures of cute dogs grinning, muscle-stretched tees and pictures of ‘bae’ to Instagram every day, across 400 million active users. That’s 400 billion photos in total. What we have here isn’t a series of narcissistic episodes but an attachment to social media that is so profoundly embedded in ourselves it’s almost impossible to tweet our way out. But why would we want to escape? Why shouldn’t we want to do this, especially if something like this always been wired into human existence?

The Science

10,000 years ago we would still have been posting selfies. The University of California (UCLA) recently discovered that our brains are naturally wired for interaction and bonding. Researchers found that even when are brains are at our rest, we are preparing to be social – a characteristic that can only be enhanced by twenty-four seven access to the web.

‘The brain has a major system that seems predisposed to get us ready to be social in our spare moments,’ claims Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor of psychology, psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences. ‘The social nature of our brains is biologically based.’

But alongside the idea of the selfie as simply the continuation of socialised self-expression, there is also the notion that social media addiction can be compared to drug abuse. In 2012, researchers from the University of Bergen found that Facebook dependency is linked to the activation of the reward centre in our brain: it can induce changes in brain reward pathways in much the same way as drug addiction.

‘The social nature of the site itself was considered problematic, especially for women, extroverts, and those unable to fall asleep until very late at night (people with a delayed sleep-wake rhythm),’ researchers added.

The study also found that participants were more likely to respond quicker to notifications from their mobile phones, than they were to react to street signals such as traffic lights and stop signs.

Luckily, signs of social media addiction are easy to spot when self-declared addict Emma Power shares her symptoms with the Guardian.

‘You can’t get beyond the main course in a restaurant before you get out your phone and instagram the duck confit,’ Power divulges. ‘In fact, you are itching to snap away by the time the first course arrives’.

‘The very first thing you do when you wake up is reach for your phone (always by the side of your bed, in fact usually under your pillow),’ she continues.

Compromised interactions with a loved one, anthropomorphised references to social media and self-indulgence of likes also make Power’s list of disempoweringly addictive behaviour.

If social media addiction is really a terrifying reality of the twenty first century, what is being done about it? Unsurprisingly, there are already several self-help books online, including: Break Free From Your Social Media Addiction by Realsimple and How to defeat a social networking addiction from Wikihow, both opting for the cards down approach: acknowledge, abstinence and recovery.

Elsewhere, petrified parents are told to ban their children from using smartphones in the bedroom, as a study found that children were waking in the middle of the night (in cold sweats, presumably) to update their social media. Others suggest restrictions of internet connectivity during the daytime: according to this outlook, tweets are worse than sweets when it comes to Junior’s health.

When Junior reaches Senior level, the treatment gets tougher. In 2009, the first ever internet-addiction rehab facility was opened in the US, featuring the 45-day program reSTART, helping IAD (internet addiction disorder) sufferers regain normality. The first patient to walk through reSTART’s doors was a 19-year-old who could not remove himself from the online role-playing game World of Warcraft. The reSTART program consists of therapists, yoga instructors and recreational coaches and is designed to induce social and career development within the addict. The course, however, costs upwards of $14,500 dollars meaning rehab may not be optimal strategy-wise.

You and Me

So has the calamity of internet addiction spread into our own journalistic community? Absolutely. As productive and resourceful as we may be, the Internet plays an indispensible role in data procurement and publishing solutions. Without it our work is archaic.

Should we be worried about the dangers of social media addiction that lurks around every corner of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram? ‘Internet Distraction: The Writer’s Main Dilemma’, published by The Huffington Post in 2015 likes to think so.

‘Let’s take the negative of social media first’, Kristen Houghton writes, ‘number one, social media networking takes a lot of one’s time.

‘You can become so focused on checking social media that you end up wasting precious writing time sitting at computer or scrolling through other people’s lives. You get caught up in the social media whirl and it draws you in.

‘The rule here is: being a good writer is 3% hard work and 97% not getting distracted by the internet’, she proclaims.

Houghton’s concerns ring true – and uncomfortably close to home. Perhaps us junior journos make up the demographic most at risk of catching Internet Addiction Disorder.

See y’all in rehab.

Sources

https://instagram.com/press/

http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/from-tragic-selfie-deaths-to-instagramming-on-the-go-how-vanity-went-viral-a2957101.html

http://www.medicaldaily.com/facebook-addiction-activates-same-brain-areas-drugs-how-social-media-sites-hook-you-320252

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-05/uoc–eww052815.php

http://www.realsimple.com/work-life/technology/social-media-addiction

http://www.wikihow.com/Defeat-a-Social-Networking-Addiction

http://mashable.com/2009/08/23/restart-internet-addiction/#fUbFRPoAPkqS

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristen-houghton/internet-distraction-the-writers-main-dilemma_b_8248214.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/parents-kids-smartphones_5600226fe4b0fde8b0cef8f3

Superb Birds of Paradise perform Strictly-worthy courtship dances to secure their mates, and male Bowerbirds build large, elaborate structures out of twigs and decorate them with flowers, feathers and even rubbish, all in the name of love.

And clickbait, well, clickbait is the peacock. You can’t miss it. It’s sensational and in your face, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty you’ll find it’s simply just another bird. The crux of the matter is that journalists have been fine-tuning techniques to reach the masses for hundreds of years, and this decade it’s all about the bait and click.

It’s a simple yet psychologically intelligent approach of inspiring curiosity across newsfeeds all over the world. It works, but it has certainly had its fair share of haters, and this, hopefully, is my chance to riposte.

I recently stumbled across a rather peculiar article in Elle, in which the writer publicly disowned her entire journalistic works from 2009 to 2011. The headline : ‘My private shame: you’ve fallen for my clickbait headlines’. She described her work as ‘shameful’, ‘embarrassing’ and in opposition to what she believes good writing is. But she was good at it. She made a decent living. And she had a job.

As far as I was aware, writing intuitive and punchy headlines that persuade readers to buy into your content is the epitome of great journalism. One of the greatest headline writers of all time, Vinnie Musetto, has been hailed as the ‘Godfather of clickbait’ in the New York Post and congratulated by the Times and the Guardian for his ‘flawless’ lead: ‘Headless body in topless bar’. A story narrating the scene of a 1983 murder, where a man killed the owner of a strip club, and then proceeded to force a patron to remove the victim’s head. Vinnie’s other works include the just as dramatic: ‘500Lb sex maniac goes free’ and the more sensational: ‘I slept with a trumpet’. And this was nearly 30 years ago.

Which is why, the often-foremost dig at the technique is that it’s degrading to the most ancient public service that is journalism. A colleague and fellow writer for Proof Reading accuses clickbait of prioritising the fast and loose approach, while benching ‘informative’ and ‘comprehensive’ to the reserve squad.

But when exactly has the latter been compromised by clickbait? It’s not as though the media is now ruled by ’10 amazing ways to shave inches off your waist’, is it? I like to think that every publication should have its time and place to pursue readership, and it’s up to the readership to pursue the publication. In all honestly, if you were to analyse your Facebook newsfeed and discover that you now know more about The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and crazy things girls do at parties, it’s because that is exactly what you subscribe to. It is the public’s own disengagement and personal disinterests that block political discussion and involvement.

A second notion (which I like to think is most often to be found in the Reuters office) is that only moronic publications utilise clickbait. My thoughts? Only a moron would utilise clickbait and do it wrong. Who’s to say that clickbait isn’t a rock-solid 21^st century investment into journalism? A well-rounded, curiosity-inspiring headline will often lead to a click, and, if the content is sound and non-deceiving, a click could turn into a subscription. If, however, the publication gets it grossly wrong, the very same click turns into an unsatisfied reader, which will rarely, if ever, visit the page again.

Buzzfeed is the perfect example of how a heretic company can utilise the clickbait framework to its full potential. The website sees upwards of 150 million users through its doors everyday and is valued at $850 million dollars. Certainly not a number to scoff at when the Times and the Guardian have been on their knees for years.

In 2014, Buzzfeed released a statement aimed directly at their critics in an attempt to educate the world on clickbait. Editor-in-chief Ben Smith tells us that Buzzfeed’s business thesis is ‘to deliver the reader something so new, funny, revelatory, or delightful that they feel compelled to share it’ – and they’re doing it well. A quick scan of their Facebook newsfeed presents the evidence. ’19 Things You Only Get If You’re A Lazy Girl Who Hates Getting Ready’. 1285 shares. ’27 Art History Photos That Are Too Funny For Their Own Good’. 4618 shares. And my personal favourite: ’23 Things All People With long, Lustrous Hair Will Understand’. 5003 shares.

‘The best way to ensure your readers won’t choose to share a story or a post is to trick them,’ he continues, then goes on to offer a vivid description of misleading clickbait as ‘pollution’ of the newsfeed.

In fact, Buzzfeed doesn’t actually charge its advertisers per click. They have introduced a sustainable and workable economic environment into journalism for the masses, which doesn’t conflict with the core values of the pioneers. This is the future of journalism, whether you turn your nose up or not.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jun/09/vincent-musetto-new-york-post-headline

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-godfather-of-clickbait

http://www.elle.com/life-love/a29603/my-private-shame-hating-what-i-wrote/

https://www.facebook.com/BuzzFeed?fref=ts

https://proof-reading.org/sharing-the-spectacle-of-the-self/

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/why-buzzfeed-doesnt-do-clickbait#.pd3gDDJw8