Scroll down the Boston Globe’s homepage and you’ll come to a lineup of stories under the heading “From Our Partners.” They have headlines like “You can afford that big European trip — here’s how.” That item, whose author is unnamed, offers “tips and tricks” from a foreign exchange expert at TD Bank and promotes the bank’s financial services.
In fact, the article is an ad for TD Bank, but it’s labeled on the Globe website as “sponsored content.” A disclaimer in minuscule type at the end of the article says, “This content was written by the advertiser and edited by Studio/B to uphold The Boston Globe’s content standards. The news and editorial departments of The Boston Globe had no role in its writing, production, or display.”
Don’t ask me what that means.
“Sponsored content,” also called “native advertising,” is everywhere in the news business now, and the Globe is not the only major paper selling it. Even the august New York Times has ads on its website that look like news stories — but the Times at least labels them “Paid Post.”
I got into a tussle this week with my friend Dan Kennedy, who teaches journalism at Northeastern and has a blog called Media Nation. He wrote about a controversy in Maine, where a group of newspapers cut a $117,000 deal with the state to publish six articles portraying the state department of education in a flattering light. Kennedy defended the arrangement, arguing that as long as the word “sponsored” appeared on the stories everything was fine.
A few years ago, this trend still raised eyebrows. In 2015, the Columbia Journalism Review published a piece titled “Disguising Ads as Stories,” in which Damaris Colhoun argued that sponsored content would undermine newspapers’ credibility. “But despite these news ethics concerns, native advertising is becoming an increasingly important revenue generator for major news outlets,” wrote Colhoun. “They’ve also attempted to sidestep the critique that sponsored content compromises a news brand by putting language like ‘storytelling’ and ‘content,’ rather than ‘advertising,’ at the fore. To critics, this amounts to false labeling.”
These days, no one seems to blink an eye at this kind of marketing disguised as news. “That horse left the barn quite a while ago,” says Kennedy. I objected to the practice in a comment on his blog post. I said that too many people already don’t understand the difference between advertising and news — between what is bought and what cannot be bought. Kennedy replied, “Ed, I respect your views. But when high-quality publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post are accepting sponsored content, I don’t know why financially strapped local outlets should turn it away.”
Nancy West, founder of the New Hampshire Center for Public Interest Journalism, knows why. “Sponsored content is fake news,” she wrote. “It’s that simple.”
I’m with Nancy. Sponsored content kills journalism’s most valuable asset: trust.
“The New York Times and the Washington Post should stop,” West wrote. “Being poor or even broke is no excuse for any newspaper to feed into the public’s mistrust of what we do.”
