By Francis Moran
A few years back, my pal Ian Graham acquainted me with his “law of three.” If any subject or person or issue crosses Graham’s attention three times in relatively short order, he believes he ought to pay attention to it. It’s an intriguing notion that I have found plays out in my own life more often than I might expect. Graham’s law intersected last night with my colleague Leo Valiquette’s piece earlier this week about “the mocking white glare of an empty page.” Having begged off posting yesterday to finish a client project and faced with having to produce a post for today, I was struck by an article I read about Canadian movie house Alliance Films seeking to charge Canadian journalists as much as €2,500 for interviews with bold-name stars such as Brad Pitt at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It was the third article I read this week about interesting and controversial developments in modern journalism and, not wishing to be mocked either by my empty screen or by my hardacre blog editor, the idea for this post was clumsily conceived.
The first of the three issues to catch my eye was a brief paragraph in a story on Monday by the Globe and Mail’s superb public health reporter André Picard. If I was pitching a public health story in Canada, Picard would be at the top of my list; he is a knowledgeable and thoughtful reporter who provides well-considered analysis of the complex issues facing public health and healthcare in general in Canada today. My high opinion of Picard is not an isolated one; he has been repeatedly recognised for his work and it is clear that most other practitioners of the media relations craft single him out when they have a story to pitch to his beat.
The result is that he is regularly given access to reports and other material in advance of their official publication or release date. It’s a practice known as an embargo; PR people negotiate a contract, usually no more rigorous than a verbal or emailed agreement, whereby they give a reporter advance access to a story and the reporter agrees not to publish or broadcast anything until a certain day and time. (In our PR practice, we regularly employ embargoes, and have written about the advantages and disadvantages of embargoes.) On Monday, though, in a story about a new national strategy on mental health, Picard wrote, “The Globe and Mail obtained a copy of the strategy, entitled ‘Changing Direction, Changing Lives,’ under embargo but is publishing before the Tuesday release date because of leaks to other media outlets.”
It’s unusual for reporters to reference such arrangements in their stories, so I took notice. When I decided last night to include this episode in this post, I emailed Picard asking him a few questions about the specific circumstances of this embargo and what led him to break it, and I invited him to share with me his views about the ethics and practicality of embargoes. As of the time this post went up, I hadn’t heard back from him. If I do — and I hope I will because I’d like to hear from a reporter whose professionalism is unquestioned — I will update this post.
Embargoes have been around almost forever, and are likely not going anywhere soon. Reporters and PR people can debate the ethics and merits of them, but I continue to see them as useful tools, albeit tools that can be misused at times. However, there is always the hazard, both to the organisation pitching the news and to journalists who comply with an embargo, that a less scrupulous outlet will not respect agreements into which it freely entered.
The second and third issues are more central to the challenging economic model that is the news business today. Both cropped up yesterday and, again, both were reported in the Globe and, either directly or indirectly, involved the Globe. (Guess what major Canadian media outlet is my go-to source!) Mid-yesterday afternoon, the paper announced it would start charging for access to its online content, a practice known as erecting a paywall behind which its previously free content would now shelter. Other papers have experimented with paywalls, only to dismantle them after a period; others still, including some of the best-known media outlets on the planet such as the New York Times, have persisted, with the Times reporting it expects to earn $85-million this year through online subscriptions. It’s not-insignificant incremental revenue any newspaper surely could use.
In defending his paper’s move to put up a paywall, Globe publisher Phillip Crawley said it was in response to an unpredictable advertising market that has seen both print and digital sales drop this spring, according to the Globe’s own story on the subject. (The story also reported that the Globe would be asking its staff to volunteer to take unpaid vacations this summer in a futher effort to balance the books.)
Within three hours of the story going live on the paper’s website, some 500 comments had already been posted. I scrolled through dozens of screens of comments without finding a single one that wasn’t critical of the move.
I’m not sure I agree with all those critics.
Producing excellent journalism costs a great deal of money and the Globe and Mail is a lonely bastion of excellence that has bucked the near-industry-wide trend towards reducing staff, buying cheap wire and filler copy, and otherwise joining the race to the bottom. Like the Times and a few other exceptional titles such as Britain’s Guardian, the Globe has continued to invest heavily in high-quality content. In the Globe’s case, it has also preserved its many bureaus in Canada and around the world, producing original and expert reporting that is unmatched anywhere in Canada and only rarely matched anywhere on the planet. That excellence has been rewarded by generally rising subscription levels although, as yesterday’s twin economies suggest, that increased readership apparently has not levered higher levels of spending by advertisers.
Newspapers are stuck between a print rock and an online hard place. Revenues from the former are eroding swiftly; the latter has not yet delivered a replacement business model. Paywalls and other experiments will, I expect, become more common.
The sketchy economics of journalism and its often-unsavoury relationship with those from whom it gets its news is at the heart of the third and last issue, which I referenced at the top of this post. I don’t suppose I should be shocked but I still am at the proposition that a major film house would seek to charge journalists for interviews with stars at a film festival. On the other hand, such interviews rarely rise above the puerile and mundane, and so I suppose it’s difficult to classify their outcome as news. It falls more clearly in the entertainment category, and who can blame studios for wanting to charge media outlets that make money off their interactions with the studios’ talent. Then again, as already made painfully clear by the paywall issue, there ain’t much golden fleece left to be sheared from this media sheep.
The doubtful economics aside, I was struck by the irony, as was the Globe reporter who wrote the story about Alliance’s sliding-scale menu of charges for access to its stars, that perhaps the biggest victims of chequebook journalism are the very stars who are now being pimped out by their studios. Most of the tacky revelations about the lives of movie stars and other celebrities are bought and paid for by media outlets only too happy to lay often-staggering sums of money on relatives, neighbours, former lovers and others who will spill the beans. Perhaps there is some sort of justice in this but I doubt anyone will be well served when every reputable outlet declines to pony up, leaving the stars at the mercy of those whose willingness to compromise their ethics will already have been well established.
Image: Steele’s student
