Public relations firms and the rise of 'product journalism'
Summary: News stories about products sell more far more products than advertising. Public relations has helped create a new form of journalism, one that's best suited to their client's needs.
Why has tech reporting become such tedious product journalism? Why are reporters competing to scoop each other on news that is essentially a spec sheet about a mass-produced product?
Why are we reading about products as a news story and not in an ad?
Whenever I look at the tech press it is heavily focused on product reporting; about gadgets, features in apps or online services, and details about underlying technologies in software, hardware, and the Internet.
Product launches, especially by industry heavyweights such as Apple, are examined in great detail; before the launch, in live reports from the launch, and for weeks afterwards.
The product is weighed, it's specifications checked against the specifications insiders thought it would have; it's measured and compared endlessly with other products. It's taken apart and each component catalogued, and journalists report estimates of how much money it cost to make.
Even a product's color is questioned in news stories, as in the white iPhone that some said was more beige than white.
Vast amounts of product journalism are being produced. Many mainstream newspapers and magazines are beefing up their product news. And multitudes of reporters race to be the first to write up the product specs of a new device.
When and why did this start?
When did journalists decide that it would be a great job, reporting about products?
When did readers start to think it was cool to read endless news stories about products?
There was a time when it wasn't like this. Reading about products was usually done by reading advertising - reading news about products was rare. How did it change?
Tech journalism became product journalism for one simple reason: it was created.
Tech companies spend 40% and more, of their annual revenues on marketing. Their cost of sales is very high and it amounts to billions of dollars in marketing. But the problem with advertising, as we can see thanks to the Internet, is it doesn't work that well.
Over the past two decades tech companies have been steadily shifting their substantial marketing funds into public relations, with the express goal to have news stories published about them and their products.
The reason is simple: Advertising is only one-third as effective as a news story about a company or product.
PR is much more efficient than advertising, you get far more marketing bang.
You sell far more product through news stories and that's what public relations firms do for their clients, they get their story into the media - and these days - into social media too. They help companies sell large amounts of products.
PR spending continues to increase, every PR company I know is booming, hiring like mad. And it's because the PR firms do their job well, and the tech industry gets what it pays for: lots of news stories about their products. It's not because the media are independent thinkers.
You'd think the media sites would prefer advertising money for product launches rather than writing about them for free. After all, there are far more interesting stories to write. I'll share some ideas over the next few weeks. The future of tech journalism is certainly not in product journalism.
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Talkback
Decades
I loved the old computer magazine reviews of new products, they'd strip the new computer down and report on what each chip on the motherboard did, how it worked and why it was better/worse than other machines on the market.
I will agree that the reviews are a mere shadow of their former selves. They'll balther on about the new ARM chip in the iPad or its retina display, but they won't actually break it down into the actual technicalities, it is all high level, boring stuff that is quick to churn out.
The other problem is, sites live from clicks, so they need to be the first out with information on what is happening, and with so many devices being released, they are an easy target for gathering clicks, especially if you can get a bunch of pro and contra bloggers on the same site arguing back and forth (like ZDNet!)...
The stories are just click bait to gain advertising revenue and the manufacturers play along, because they are getting free coverage.
I read c't magazine, here in Germany, and it still does in-depth reviews of new technology. The in-depth review doesn't appear within minutes of the new release - a simple, short news story appears, the full review comes later.
For example, whilst most blogs announced the Ivy-Bridge release with 500 word "in-depth" look at the new chipsets and processors, c't did over 10,000 words on how the new chipsets work, their advantages and disadvantages.
There are very few mainstream blogs that can dedicate that sort of time and effort - let alone have the staff available with the knowledge to write about technology in such detail. By the time they have found a knowledgeable writer and he has analysed the product in detail and produced a detailed review, the story is "dead", people have garnered a bit of information from the re-hashed press release.
Most people don't want in-depth reviews, they have the attention span of a goldfish and want everything in small, bite sized pieces that are easy to digest, before moving onto the next story.
That is why the quantity of articles and not the quality is winning out these days.
Both sides are guilty, but the whole news and media industry has driven us in this direction with the "MTV Generation".
To digress slightly, I hate modern documentaries, where they follow 4 or 5 different threads throught a programme. The problem is, unlike 20 years ago, where they would follow one story to its conclusion, then cover the next, they tend to do about 1 minute on each story, in rotation, over the 40 minute run-time of the programme. It is distracting and thoroughly annoying and instead of achieving its aim of keeping me hooked to see how the story turns out, it generally drives me to the remote control to find something less annoying to watch.
What else?
Is their something else?