Battle blunder 1: Regurgitating press releases. Why would any savvy company fork out $10,000 to have an advertising agency create a print add and then fork out an additional $5,000 to $20,000 to have the advertisement placed in a magazine (adjust the numbers a bit lower for web adverts), if they can simply pay a PR person or a ghost writer $2000 to write a press release that an editor will repurpose/regurgitate and run pretty much in its entirety (canned quotes and all). As Ry and others pointed out, readers ignore pop up advertisements to read content. If you can get your advertisement into a notable book as editorial, that’s a win win win. It costs less, people will be more likely to read it, and an editor will even sanctify it by putting his or her by-line on it. It’s just lazy journalism and a monkey can do that job. What do the publishers get out of the deal….$3,000 to $18,000 less advertising dollars than they would have and they don’t have to have qualified editors, just folks who can repurpose/regurgitate press releases quickly.

Battle blunder 2: Contributed articles in news pubs/sites. Basically this is the same thing as above but instead you are having your product marketing, pr or a ghost author writing content. Again for $.75 to $1.25 a word for a 2000 word article, you are getting your entire hidden sales pitch into a brand name pub for free. Further, it is now editorial, so readers will be more likely to read it. I think it would be an interesting test case for vendors to run a contributed article on a website and surround it by advertisements for the same product, and then compare hit and click-through rates on each. Which one will get the higher click rates? I’m betting the article will. This is the catcha 22 for publishing. When publishers go around to sell advert space these days, one of the first things they do (likely after the advertiser says “I’m not buying any print ads” for aforementioned reasons) is pull out a spreadsheet with click throughs and numbers of hits. The contributed articles, I’m sure, contribute a great deal to those click rate totals and they use them as a selling point, but what they don’t see is that it is coming at the expense of advertising…again, chasing nickels short term with no sense of longterm. Again, from the editorial perspective, this is just plain old lazy journalism. It’s much easier to edit a piece or simply send it back to the “author” or pr person who sent to you to have it edited, then it is to get on a phone and do a bit of research. From a publisher’s point of view, you really don’t need a qualified journalist to do it and you especially don’t need a full time journalist to do it (and have to pay pesky medical insurance). Thus you can cut bottom line. After all, meeting short term goals=promotion. Plus if you have a part timer doing it, they probably aren’t as concerned with quality as they are concerned with simply putting up some fresh content. Most publishers don’t understand what the editors are posting in the first place—they just care about hit rates.

Battle blunder 3: Getting rid of the relatively pricy, qualified journalists. To demonstrate this I’ve been using an analogy comparing publishing to fine dining. The first version was rough but I’ve refined it a bit.
The analogy goes like this: If you have a five start French restaurant with the best head chef, souse chef, saucier, pastry chef, etc., and then you replace them (or a lot of them) with short order cooks (part time editors) or mandate that the French chef’s serve prepackaged food (regurgitated press releases or contributed articles), then eventually the quality of the food will decline and people (readers) will notice. Eventually, they will stop coming to eat at the restaurant and will look for other places to eat.
A couple of folks have pointed to studies, which indicated a flaw in that version of the analogy. Studies conducted by EET and by Novas Software, overwhelmingly indicated that readers didn’t read a an article or visit a given pub because they followed a particular editor (in short, they were brand loyal, not loyal to editors). At first, when I heard this it was a bit of an ego blow, but then I started pondering it and added to the analogy:
Why do you go to a restaurant? The main reason is Good food. Why do you go to a publication: good content. Then I started thinking of my own reading practices. When I’m reading general press, I really don’t pay attention to the author of the story but I read the story. But when I’m reading something in my beats, I do pay attention to who wrote it. I imagine most chef’s are not only familiar with competing restaurant names and reputations, they are also familiar with who the chef’s are and associate certain quality with those chef’s. They follow the careers of the chefs or just don’t even bother with the chef’s who don’t serve good food.
To take the analogy further, the patrons of restaurants can be split into two categories: connoisseurs (pr, marketing types, industry executives) and customers (general readers). Connoisseurs not only pay attention to the names of the restaurant and the quality of the food, they become very familiar with the Chef’s cooking the food or at least are more likely to know who the chefs are and their reputations. Meanwhile, most customers of a restaurant only know the name and reputation of a restaurant (a publications brand name) and whether or not it consistently serves good food. Do most consumers know who is doing the cooking? Probably not.
So, if the chef’s leave, the connoisseurs will be the first ones to stop coming to a particular restaurant. They may come back to the restaurant a couple of times to see if the quality of the food is the same or to give the new chefs a chance, but ultimately if the food isn’t consistently good, they’ll stop going there. Maybe they will follow the old chef to his or her new restaurant.
Similarly, consumers will likely continue to go to the restaurant for a while longer than the connoisseurs because they equate the brand with quality. But very gradually they’ll notice the quality of the food has declined. And if nothing is done to improve the quality, they will eventually seek other restaurants and stop coming to the restaurant altogether.
Further, it will be interesting to see how editor/author branding plays out in the world of blogging. The blog is the author is the brand. Thoughts?