Paranoia, the Destroyer
Despite the fact that pissing off my esteemed colleage - ok,
my friend Dave Winer would damage my career more than mocking Hollywood at this point, I couldn’t let
his latest op-ed go without comment.
Dave says: It’s no secret that there’s lots of footsy gooing on, that you can’t keep a professional job and write stories that your publisher doesn’t want you to write … advertisers, once they get pricked by an article they don’t like, withdraw their advertising.
After six years of writing for pay, I haven’t seen much evidence to back this up. By contrast, I had no problem publishing an article that called the CueCat a
“clunky marketing tool” while Wired was in the middle of three-month deal during which CueCat was the magazine’s most prominent advertiser (remember those ugly barcode tags?).
Ditto for Microsoft’s IE 5.0 launch and Apple’s new iMac. On that note: contrary to the public image of those two companies, Apple’s self-appointed evangelists outside the company hassle me much more than Waggener Edstrom (Microsoft’s public relations firm) ever could. Microsoft has never made one single threat.
Anyway, I know of exactly one ad-yanking threat ever made to a publisher I write for by someone who worked for one of their advertisers. The person who made the threat (a PR manager, not an ad buyer) was deemed by her employer to be speaking out of turn.
Dave adds: I also saw editors come to meetings with sales people. The editor goes to the bathroom. The sales guy levels with me. “If you buy an ad, he’ll run the story.”
Dave, I wonder why you didn’t consider that the sales guy might be lying rather than leveling. [UPDATE: I spoke to Dave on the phone. He says he repeated the salesman's claim to the editor, who didn't deny it.]
But this is one reason why, at all the publications I write for, editors and writers aren’t allowed to go on sales calls, despite the obvious potential for using the pub’s better-known editors or writers (ahem) just to get the meeting in the first place.
What really bugs me is the general presumption in Blogtopia that most professional journalists would go against their personal ethics and mislead their readers if threatened with the loss of their jobs.
It begs the question: Do you assume so because that’s what you would do?
Truth is, getting sacked for standing up to a powerful corporation - whether an advertiser or an unscrupulous publisher - would make my personal career. I could get on 60 Minutes with a story like that. Imagine the book deal.
No such luck yet. But if you’re reading this and you are or were a journalist who was pressured to add, drop, or change a story, please do get in touch with me and we’ll talk off the record about your first-person experience. If only for my own edification.