Reuters article highlights ethical issues with native advertising - Columbia Journalism... - 0 views
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native advertising—paid stories that look and feel like a publication’s own journalism
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News providers got 20 percent of their ad revenues from native content in 2017, according to a global study of 148 publishers by the Native Advertising Institute and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. By 2021 executives expect that to increase to 36 percent
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The piece is marked “sponsored” at the top, followed by a line identifying the content as “provided by” Thailand’s foreign ministry. A line at the end in smaller, fainter font states that the article was not produced by Reuters journalists. Reuters has a section on the homepage dedicated to sponsored content, and stories sponsored by the Thai government are mingled with news stories in Google search results about the topic. But research suggests that many are either oblivious to these disclaimers or do not know what they mean.
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“Typically somewhere between a tenth and a quarter of readers get that what they read was actually an advertisement.”
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“the reason these advertorials exist is to fool at least some readers into thinking they are legitimate editorial content, or at least imbued with the rigor of Reuters reporting.”
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“All Reuters Plus content on Reuters.com is clearly labeled to differentiate it from editorial content,”
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One potential benefit of publishing a counter message on the same platform where the bad publicity originated, Wojdynski says, is having positive content appear alongside negative stories in search results.
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the fact that Reuters itself has covered this issue makes the ad even more noteworthy than other paid stories. He notes that early last year the agency’s charitable arm, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, published pieces pointing out that traffickers were still forcing people into the seafood industry despite reforms. “Publishing this sponsored content without the conflicting context provided by Reuters’s own reporting on this issue seems pretty unethical to me,”
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The commotion over the sponsored piece raises questions not just about the ethics of native advertising, but about news providers’ broader relationships with governments. Where and how should publications draw the line when taking money from governments? Should certain clients be completely off limits, and if so how does one decide which ones?
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deciding which messages are harmful requires making political and moral judgements, even if they’re unacknowledged