EFFORTS TO MAKE NEWSPAPERS more profitable may hurt their ability to serve the public interest says a special report from the Columbia University School of Journalism.
The CUSJ "Report on Marketing and Journalism," published last week after a two year-long survey and research process, points to increasing competition from electronic media outlets and cable television as the main reason why newspapers have been spurred to make changes in their editorial policy.
In the preface to the CUSJ investigation, Prof. Petra Castoriadis, chair of the school’s media analysis department, calls attention to practices “exceeding even the scope of internal or 'self-censorship' in their ability to misrepresent the public interest.”
While the CUSJ report alludes to the Monica Lewinsky scandal as a "highly publicized media disaster," its main agenda is not sensationalism or even professional misconduct. Instead, it cites brand management or "branding" as "the single greatest threat to the integrity of the U.S. newspaper."
Although the term "branding" is relatively young, brand management dates back several centuries when the registered trademark was first honored in a court of law. But as markets become global and multinational corporations form coalitions either through mergers or strategic alliances, creating a lasting identity that means one thing to all people has turned into a daunting task.
According to the CUSJ report, what is true for car manufacturers and pharmaceutical concerns is now also true for daily and weekly newspapers in the United States. "The printed news is becoming more of a product and less of a service," writes Prof. James Gozarce, an associate professor of journalism at Georgetown University. "As a result, newspapers are less likely to carry stories, that is ‘introduce products,’ that conflict with their brand identity."
While Gozarce admits that newspapers have always worn the imprint of their publisher's interests, he believes there is less than an explicit agenda at work in the revised charter of most newspaper editorial boards. “Preserving the integrity of [a newspaper's] perspective is integral to its survival.”
Gozarce warns that "rejecting stories because they conflict with a marketing agenda is an anathema to the very notion of journalism."
One of the more striking incidents of brand-driven censorship cited by the CUSJ report occurred at The Hamilton Sentinel in Hamilton, Penn. The Sentinel, an alternative weekly with a circulation of over 20,000, combines offbeat reporting on local cultural events with a muckraking tradition that began in the late 1950's when the college town of Hamilton became a hotbed for civil rights activism. But in 1997 the Sentinel's long-standing tradition of incisive political coverage and news analysis came under fire by some of its own writers.
Each year The Sentinel publishes an issue devoted to "the Hamilton lifestyle." The annual special features Hamilton's most popular restaurants, bookstores, movie theaters and antique stores and includes a "Reader's Review" section where area residents can nominate their own favorite establishments. Last year, Jane Zenger, a columnist for The Sentinel, decided to use the yearly "Hamilton Highlights" edition to call attention to plight of poor Hispanic immigrants who live in Hamilton.
But when Zenger submitted a story on deplorable living conditions in Hamilton's Hispanic neighborhood for publication in the "Hamilton Highlights" issue, the Sentinel's editors rejected the piece fearing a backlash from the paper's publisher and advertisers.
What the CUSJ report points out, however, is that the Sentinel's publisher has been marketing the alternative weekly as a bastion of "hard-hitting" critical analysis for decades. In fact, in one Sentinel ad campaign, billboards throughout the colonial-styled city of 80,000 proclaimed that "The Hamilton Sentinel is the only conscience you need."
When Zenger's column was spiked, her editors told her it had nothing to do with the politics of her piece. Rather, it was the economics of the newspaper, which counts on the popular Highlights issue for peak advertising revenue, that convinced the Sentinel's editors to block a story that "clashed with the tone and spirit" of the annual Highlights issue.
The authors of the CUSJ report suggest that the Sentinel's refusal to print an ostensibly downbeat story is not an isolated case. In their opinion, publications that have made a critical perspective synonymous with their brand name are the most likely to encounter conflicts between their marketing identity and editorial policy.
"Politics is more of a lifestyle question today than it was 30 years ago," states Castoriadis, who proposes the following analysis in the final paragraph of his preface to the CUSJ report:
Newspapers that cater to the political lifestyle are necessarily advertorial in nature. While some grant themselves license to evolve by being self-critical, others are obligated to cover-up their business interests. For the latter, marketing demographics must then inform the crusades they make, the issues they raise and the causes they champion. If the demographics indicate an affluent, young and white consumer as the target audience, the target of their politics will rarely be this same niche market. In this case, what's bad news for the preferred reader is simply never the news.
The South to the Future World Wide Wire Service is a weekly feed of technology and media news commentary and satire published by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Quotations attributed to public figures who are satirized are often true, but sometimes invented. Some fictional statements may, in fact, be true. Any other use of real names is accidental and coincidental.
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