BuzzFeed has drawn a lot of press this year for the success of its social advertising product. The company’s advertising wing is an agency that works with advertisers to create sponsored content in the BuzzFeed mold. These aren’t just your classic advertorials — the pages in the magazine with the slightly off typeface and the bad writing. This is content infused with the voice and sensibility of BuzzFeed itself, tailor-made for its audience.
Versions of the agency model are in place at organizations such as Forbes, Gawker, The Huffington Post and the Atlantic. I’ve also heard echoes of this model in conversations with forward-thinking sales managers, who approach companies not just to solicit advertising, but to pitch marketing expertise in a variety of domains — not just display ads, but search engine marketing, social advertising and more.
The point is that all the innovation and work we put into doing journalism may produce more value than mere space for advertising adjacencies. As we develop our ability to work with data, produce info-rich experiences for mobile devices, or experiment with distributed reporting, we may hit on tools and techniques valuable enough to help subsidize our journalism. But if we’re not attuned to those possibilities, they won’t exist.
It feels easier to just say journalists should minimize all dealings with their business-side counterparts. But that feels deeply wrong to me. Ethical behavior is not about trying to avoid situations that might challenge us to behave ethically. Ethical behavior is about regularly thinking through our values and how they should be applied, and then acting accordingly.
Read more at Poynter
