It's Always About the Money but What About Transparency?

 Murphy Patterson
 mp385915@ohio.edu

We like to think that we know an advertisement when we see one, right? Well, like the great Bob Dylan said, these times they are a-changin'. Whether you call them native ads, branded content or sponsored content, these ads are made to look like editorial content and have readers everywhere thinking they are reading an article written by a journalist. There are many ethical concerns when dealing with this type of advertising, but money seems to be taking attention away from the ethical issues.

People are not paying for online journalism and that is hurting newspapers and sites that rely on subscriptions. This is the main reason for the rise of native advertising. Since the ads look so much like real editorial journalism, people pay attention to them and rarely realize they are reading an advertisement. Readers have begun to turn a blind eye to advertisements and with ad-blocking technology, advertising companies have to find new ways to get their message out to consumers. This has forced them to be creative and find ways to reach readers, and to have readers actually pay attention.

This type of advertising has created an economic boom for the advertising industry. According to the Pew Research Center, native advertising created $4.6 billion in revenue in 2017. When putting up such big numbers of revenue, advertising companies will pay newspapers to run their ads because they know native advertisements are working better than banner ads or other forms of online advertisements.

When talking about advertisements in print media, ethical challenges come up. With native advertisements there are many ethical issues, and the biggest one is transparency. As journalists we should pride ourselves on reporting truth and being transparent. The lines get extremely fuzzy when journalistic publications are allowing ads that readers are unable to distinguish from actual news stories. How is this being transparent? Comedian and host of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver, talks about how advertising and news should be looked at like we look at church and state. We want to keep the two separated for specific reasons. The reason we should keep ads out of our news is so we do remain transparent.

                                          Video Via: Last Week Tonight (HBO)

With major publications, such as the The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times using native advertising, there is risk for readers to become less trustworthy of their sources. Journalists can lose credibility from these ads. As journalists, we should stand up to these ads and demand some sort of guidelines that guarantee readers won't be mislead and will be able to tell what is and advertisement or sponsored content, and what is true editorial content. One thing I believed to be a good rule for native ads, is to have the ads use a different font and style than the main editorial content of the publication. ASME is implementing many guidelines such as this to allow readers to know what is advertising and what is not.

Journalists' credibility has been at risk for a decent period of time and native ads aren't doing us any favors in regaining our credibility. We have to be able to stick to our main values and continue being transparent with our readers. Readers want to be able to trust news sources, but will have trouble doing that when advertisements are being made to look like news stories. We as journalists need to take this more into account and stand up for guidelines to make native advertising more recognizable.