At the Social Shake-Up, Mike Federle, the COO of Forbes; Carl Lavin, the homepage editor of CNN Digital; and Mary Ellen Egan, the Senior Content Director at Social Media Today, tackled how journalism and publishing are evolving in a panel titled "When Your Customers Become Your Contributors: Brand Journalism Meets Traditional." Simon Pearce of Fabric Branding moderated.
To kick off the panel, Simon asked, "In the social age where anyone can publish anything, anywhere, any time, what is a media brand? Is it a platform, is it a publisher?"
Mike noted that Forbes is maintaining their traditional publication while quickly growing their digital platform: "The publishing side remains the front door of the brand, because the Forbes brand is so well known around the world. But the digital is 60-65% on the revenue side." They are accomplishing this by maintaining and growing a huge contributor network, consisting of "1400 writers who have been vetted by our senior editors, who are each in charge of a particular channel." Essentially, the editorial happens with the contributor selection, after which contributors can publish directly to the platform with no editorial oversight.
Mary Ellen spoke to how things have changed for her, as someone who started off as a "traditional" journalist but lived through the shift to digital and blogging. When the shift was first beginning, she noted, "The print people were always like, 'Oh those digital hacks!'" Meanwhile, the bloggers "thought we were scotch-drinking, cigar-smoking" stereotypes of journalists who produced one paltry article a day. Since those early years, she's come to realize that "blogs allow us to engage with so many more people. Contributors become commenters themselves," extending the story beyond the original piece.
Simon wondered if the constant reality of getting scooped by Twitter and Facebook was making traditional outlets, burdened with fact-checking, start to fear irrelevancy.
Not at all, Carl stated, noting, "It's only true if I see it on CNN: [people who say that] are the people who are valuable to us." Mary Ellen agreed, noting that she found out about Joan Rivers's death through Twitter but immediately turned to the New York Times for verification, context, and additional information. "As we've learned," she said, "the internet has changed how we consume information, and we have to be more skeptical now."
The panelists then waded into the murkier waters of brand journalism and whether it's playing nicely with publishers. Everyone agreed that sponsored content had to be marked as such, whether through clear labeling or obvious font and stylistic differences. "If you step on a line," said Mary Ellen, "the crowd's going to let you know."
When it comes to brand journalism, "content is content, on the web," Mike said, " and marketers have just as much of a right to be talking about it as anyone else," as long as they're not trying to pull something over on the audience. And there are standards, of course: for instance, if a company wants to put out sponsored content claiming vaccines are deadly or that there's a home-made vaccine replacement that's safer, that content certainly wouldn't make it onto CNN. "If it's not true, and we can prove it's not true, we won't accept it," Carl said simply.
And the publishers' own brands aren't becoming less important as a result of the internet, Mike said. In fact, "the brand becomes more important: the reason we're able to attract 1400 contributors is because they want to write for a reputable brand that's going to bring them recognition as well."
Carl envisioned the new structure of publishing as a pyramid: "At the widest point, the base, people can comment on stories [and become a part of the story itself]. But as you go further up, there's more and more vetting [of contributors] until you get to the very top. Brands can participate at any level - except the very top."
"Digital allows everyone to join the conversation," Carl said. "The publishing part stays true to the old-style values of journalism - clarity, accuracy, urgency and context - but the audience is part of this too. The journalist is no longer preaching to a sleepy congregation."
In other words, the congregation itself is waking up and clamoring to be a part of the story, and it's a crowd that includes brands, companies, and marketers along with regular readers. Publishing is going to have to keep evolving to accommodate it.