But that's the exception, not the rule. As the advertising department likes to constantly point out, it's the ads that pay the bills. Their end product would be nothing but letterbox filler without the editorial content to attract an audience, but the ad crew will never let you forget who ultimately pays everybody's wages and keeps the lights on.
Still, while they usually share the same roof, the editorial and advertising teams are fiercely independent. Editors don't tell sales managers how to sell their space, and nobody from advertising can come onto the newsroom floor and dictate how the news is going to be presented to the world, even if it makes a client look bad.
The two departments might come together for special projects, and there may be some crossover in the worlds of advertorials and B2B publications, but in general the two departments in all good and proper media companies remain strongly separated.
Unfortunately, the news media is fucking awful at advertising this independence, because there are some gross misconceptions about the influence advertisers have on the final news presentation.
In an excellent recent Twitter thread recently, Washington Post reporter Laura Helmuth revealed how smart, sharp and educated people who were inquisitive and had read newspapers their whole lives still had some incredibly firm and incredibly wrong ideas about the way the news media worked, and the first question went straight to the relationship between advertisers and editorial.
Helmuth rightly pointed out that the news crew had no idea what ads were being sold, and the advertising people didn't know what stories were appearing. Anything else and all your credibility goes right out the window, and nobody will ever take you seriously if you show how far you're willing to bend over and take it from corporate interests.
Any decent newsroom would be appalled to have their conduct dictated by the ads that were being sold. It's just not acceptable. A newsroom has got to have some goddamn ethics, or it's just a mouthpiece for the rich and powerful and the masthead becomes worthless.
Many, many journalists take this very seriously. Media Scrum has personally seen people from the advertising department literally marched off the newsroom floor when somebody tried to complain that a web story cast a bad light on a company that spent a lot of advertising dollars. They didn't last a minute.
There are, as always, annoying exceptions to this moral position, because reality is more awkward and complicated than it looks from up on a high horse. There is the aforementioned advertorial, which is usually 100% produced in the advertising department (unless an editorial writer needs to score some quick cash by bashing out some anonymous copy after work). It is also a bit harder to argue that some columnists have been fully detached by advertising on an issue, but that's because columns are pure opinion, and every piece of advertising ever created is all about influencing somebody's opinion on something.
And there are straight up newsrooms who follow their masters call explicitly, no matter how ideologically dodgy they get, and nobody should ever take anything they say seriously.
In fact, the only time advertising can really be weaponized against editorial in a morally justifiable way is if the editorial content is so odious, so full of hatred and bullshit, that a consumer boycott of advertisers brings about change.
This isn't a matter of free speech, or shutting down balance - nobody needs a media outlet telling us that pedophilia and murder is a-okay, and nobody needs anybody espousing views that are unmistakably Nazi (hot tip for the easily confused, if you're reading or listening to something that is saying Nazi things and saying that those Nazi things are worthwhile, you're reading or listening to fucking Nazis, and fuck those guys always.) Despite bleating about freedom of speech, this is just capitalism at full force, with society dictating that this shit is not acceptable, and does not have a God-given right to be supported by any advertising dollars
But that's the extreme end of the scale, and most of that scale is full of newsrooms who want nothing to do with the advertising side of things, as long as they get their pay every week.
Of course, this is a time when most of the advertising money that has kept the business chugging along has vanished in the slow plod towards digital news content, swallowed up by the gaping maws of Google and Facebook. Who can keep the lights on when the classified ads have all shifted to TradeMe?
But that's a problem for the folk in those advertising and marketing departments. The newsrooms can only do what they always do, and try and create the best content they can. RNZ might be the only place don't have to deal with the demands to get an audience to keep the dollars rolling in, but every serious newsroom just needs to keep that fair distance away from the money.
- Ron Troupe
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