Advertisers should stop funding Facebook and start funding real journalism

Couldn’t agree more on The Guardian’s steadfast and dogged pursuit of organisations with misguided view on their morals obligations towards privacy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacking_scandal#The_Guardian_July_2009_reports

Thanks, Peter.

I had a magazine advertiser tell me the other day they were directing all their budget to Facebook advertising now. I was astonished to hear that, given everything we’ve heard about the ethical abyss in which that corporation operates.

I am a great supporter of quality and trustworthy journalism. I am here aren’t I? The problem is eyeballs, who they belong to and the way ads are delivered to them in a fragmented mediascape. Facebook, Instagram et all have the eyeballs, they know exactly who they belong to and they deliver ads with some degree of targeting (sometimes very precise targeting) to those eyeballs.

So it’s all very good and well asking advertisers to search their innermost feelings and make an ethical decision to invest elsewhere based on FB’s misdeeds, but you’d have more chance of a herd of rabid camel swan-diving through the eye of my grandmother’s knitting needle than for enough advertisers to abandon a platform en masse where their audience is and to make a discernable difference to either Facebook’s bottom line or the long term prospects of ‘trusted’ news media.

For niche mags I disagree about the eyeballs. If I could afford to do a print run I would (as against the current interactive PDF) as ALL subscribers without question prefer print. They have told me so.
I have the eyeballs. Just not the advertisers to pay for the physical print run.
I know exactly where they are getting their advice (vendors I mean) that digital is “better”….

The Guardian is, indeed, an amazing example of a truly outstanding journalistic organisation.

It’s just a shame that most of the members of Peter Miller’s organisation would cheer if it went out of existence, lobbied the government to deny it access to funding because it’s a “foreign organisation” (as opposed to the millions handed to American owned Foxtel with no democratic oversight), and all because they don’t like its politics.

Australian news organisations are their own worse enemies, sniping at each other like two bald men arguing over who used to own a comb.

Advertisers will put their money where they feel they can get the best return on their investment and its up to more traditional news outlets like the Guardian to demonstrate their platform has an engaged audience that retains information, rather than a distracted audience that pumps out views & likes. In order to do that they need to show they are a trusted source.

Unfortunately Mainstream media keeps shooting itself in the foot. Coverage of Obama, Trudeau, Trump and Brexit for example, has been lovestruck, teenagecrushlike, hostile and myopic in that order. It’s no wonder that comedians and bloggers are increasingly being viewed as new 4th estate – challenging people in power and representing the views of the people.

For too long journalists have focused on meeting deadlines and other logistics of the job, which bloggers can now do cheaper and with a lot less fuss. What makes journalists special is that they are trained (or should be trained) to find the real story, get to the truth and write it without getting their employers put in jail. Recently graduated journalists seem to understand that, so it’s now up to media owners like the Guardian to start backing themselves before they start wagging their fingers at the advertisers they would like to have as clients.

That horse has bolted.

Indeed the fact that one paper (funded by a trust as its ad revenue is not enough) uncovered it while the rest of the commercial print world was peddling clickbait and celebrity stories underscores this.

Its this cycle, there is little quality journalism because there is little advertising funding, but on the other side of that coin – there is little advertising because there is little quality journalism.

Somewhere along the line newspapers decided to go the clickbait/cheap article route rather than long-form, meaningful investigative journalism. This meant that they got more eyeballs – but these were (classist comment warning) they eyeballs of people with little spending power – and therefore of little interest to advertisers.

I suspect this solution is too late but having a decently funded publication which funded decent journalism could be pitched to advertisers easier “Our audience is better educated and wealthier/more powerful so its worth the advertising”….maybe it would work. Worth a try innit?

Some will argue that both the Australian and the Guardian do proper investigative journalism (and its true that they do) but because of their clear lack of impartiality they lose more than half the potential audience (some because they are ideological enemies of the paper’s editorial bent, some because they simply can’t take a biased paper seriously). So no, I don’t thinks its been tried yet.

Peter, are you an impartial source?

The second the Guardian and co. give me an ad suite half as good as Facebook’s happy to have the discussion. FB may not have as engaged an audience or content, but they know how to add value to advertisers with brilliant tools and tech to help you get results.

On Facebook we never measure through ‘brand’ metrics. Just chuck those conversion pixels down and watch the CPA. Much more accurate and reliable metric.