Even though credibility is all you have to sell, it’s not enough anymore. Credibility is not working as a business model. Credibility of journalism is at an all-time low, anyway.
—KELLY MCBRIDE, POYNTER INSTITUTE
THE PROBLEM OF JOURNALISM, SAYS EDWARD JAY Epstein in his book Between Fact and Fiction, is simple. Journalists are rarely in a position to establish the truth of an issue themselves, since they didn’t witness it personally. They are “entirely dependent on self-interested ‘sources’ ” to supply their facts. Every part of the news-making process is defined by this relationship; everything is colored by this reality.
Who are these self-interested sources? Well, anyone selling a product, a message, or an agenda. People like me.
When the New York Times publishes leaked documents, there is an implicit understanding that they have at least attempted to verify their validity. The same goes for the identity of the source who gave it to them. Online, “anonymous” means something else entirely. Quotes and tips are drawn from unsolicited, untraced e-mails or angry comments pulled from comments sections, or sent in by people who have something to gain from it. I know, because I have been this kind of source dozens of times, and it was never for anything important. My identity is never verified.
Today, the online-driven news cycle is going a million miles a minute in a million directions. The New York Times may still try to verify their sources, but it hardly matters, because no one else does. This creates endless opportunities for people like me to slip in and twist things to my liking. As Epstein said, the discrepancy between what actually happened and the version of what happened provided by sources is an enormous gray area. Of all such areas, it’s where I have the most fun and direct influence.
Once during a lawsuit I needed to get some information into the public discussion of it, so I dashed off a fake internal memo explaining the company’s position, printed it out, scanned it, and sent the file to a bunch of blogs as if I were an employee leaking a “memo we just got from our boss.” The same bloggers who were uninterested in the facts when I informed them directly gladly put up exclusive! and leaked! posts about it. They could tell my side of the story because I told it to them in words they wanted to hear. More people saw it than ever would have had I issued an “official statement.”
I once had a client who had been subjected to a complete hit job of a piece by a major newspaper. The writer of the article had actually been running their own hater blog about the company they then “objectively” reported on. When the client complained to the writ-er’s editor, the editor shrugged it off. To reply, I simply had the client write a long e-mail to his staff explaining what happened and laying out the complete (and embarrassing) case against the article. Then we forwarded that e-mail to a media reporter at a different outlet, who published it in full. The e-mail read well and was quite damning—because it had been written for the express purpose of being made public. The original outlet had no choice but to respond and will hopefully think twice about a hatchet job like that in the future.
Another time I had some promotional images for a Halloween campaign I also couldn’t use, because of copyright concerns. I still wanted them seen, so I had one of my employees e-mail them to Jezebel and Gawker and write, “I shouldn’t be doing this but I found some secret images on the American Apparel server and here they are.” The post based on this lie did ninety thousand views. The writer wrote back a helpful tip: No need to leak me info from your company e-mail address; you might get caught. I thought, But how else could she be sure they were real?
It was funny at the time. Then a few months later, a U.S. congressman allegedly exchanged e-mails with a girl on craigslist and sent her a shirtless photo of himself. The girl forwarded this photo and the incriminating e-mail correspondence that supposedly occurred along with it to Gawker (which owns Jezebel). Gawker posted it, and the congressman immediately resigned.
Knowing now that an anonymous tip to Gawker had the power to end the career of a U.S. congressman took a little of the fun out of it for me. Scratch that—now my personal knowledge of how sourcing works online genuinely scares me.*
When I first started in PR, all of the leading web gurus were proclaiming the death of the press release. Good riddance, I thought. Journalists should care too much about what they write to churn out articles and posts based on press releases.
I could not have been more wrong. Before long I came to see the truth: Blogs love press releases. It does every part of their job for them: The material is already written; the angle laid out; the subject newsworthy; and, since it comes from an official newswire, they can blame someone else if the story turns out to be wrong.
As a 2010 study by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found:
As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.1 [emphasis mine]
So I started putting out press releases all the time. Open a new store? Put out a press release. Launch a new product? Put out a press release. Launch a new color of a new product? Press release. A blogger might pick it up. And even if no outlets do, press releases through services like PRWeb are deliberately search-engine optimized to show up well in Google results indefinitely. Most important, investing sites like Google Finance, CNN Money, Yahoo! Finance, and Motley Fool all automatically syndicate the major release wires. If you’re a public company with a stock symbol, the good news in any release you put out shows up right in front of your most important audience: stockholders. Minutes after you put it out, it’s right there on the company’s stock page in the “Recent News” section, eagerly being read by investors and traders.
I quickly learned that not everyone saw this as harmless, low-hanging media fruit. My instinct is not illegal profit, but for those who have it, blogs’ blind faith in press releases presents opportunities. It did for New York stockbroker Lambros Ballas: He was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for issuing fake online press releases about the stocks of companies like Google, Disney, and Microsoft and seeding them on blogs and finance forums. On the fake news of an acquisition offer from Microsoft, shares of Local.com jumped 75 percent in one day, after which he and other traders dumped all their shares and moved on to pumping other stocks on fake news.2 In Austin a man named Christopher French was fined forty thousand dollars by the SEC for pumping up stocks via articles on SeekingAlpha.com under fake names. The fake names weren’t the problem. The problem was that he was paid at least sixteen thousand dollars by the companies to write those articles. When I later saw reports of a man who planned to set off explosive devices at Target so he could buy their stock at a discount and profit from the eventual rebound, I thought: Man, somebody should have told this guy there is a much, much easier way to do that.
It’s stunning how much news is now driven by such releases—reputable or otherwise. A LexisNexis search of major newspapers for the words “in a press release” brings back so many results that the service actually attempts to warn you against trying, saying, “This search has been interrupted because it will return more than 3,000 results. If you continue with this search it may take some time to return this information.” Same goes for the phrases “announced today” and “told reporters.” In other words, newspapers depended on marketing spam literally too many times to count in the last year.
A Google blog search for “said in a press release” (meaning they quoted directly from a release) brings back 307,000 results for the same period as the LexisNexis search, and more than 4 million for all time. “Announced today” brings up more than 32,000 articles for a single week. If you get specific, an internal search of TechCrunch brings up more than 5,000 articles using “announced today” and 7,000 attributed citations to press releases. This pales in comparison to the Huffington Post, whose bloggers have written the words “announced today” more than 50,000 times and cited press releases more than 200,000 times. And, of course, there is also talking-pointsmemo.com, whose name unintentionally reveals what most blogs and newspapers carelessly pass on to their readers: prewritten talking points from the powers that be.
Anyone can now be that power. Anyone can give blogs their talking points. To call it a seller’s market is an understatement. But it’s the only thing I can think of that comes close to describing a medium in which dominant personalities like tech blogger Robert Scoble can nostalgically repost things on his Google+ account like the “original pitch” for publicity that the iPad start-up Flipboard had sent him. It’s a great time to be a media manipulator when your marks actually love receiving PR pitches.
Bloggers are under incredible pressure to produce, leaving little time for research or verification, let alone for speaking to sources. In some cases, the story they are chasing is so crazy that they don’t want to risk doing research, because the whole facade would collapse.
In my experience, bloggers operate by some general rules of thumb: If a source can’t be contacted by e-mail, they probably can’t be a source. I’ve talked to bloggers on the phone only a few times, ever—but thousands of times over e-mail. If background information isn’t publicly or easily available, it probably can’t be included. Writers are at the mercy of official sources, such as press releases, spokesmen, government officials, and media kits. And these are for the instances when they even bother to check anything.
Most important, they’re at the mercy of Wikipedia, because that’s where they do their research. Too bad people like me manipulate that too. Nothing illustrates this better than the story of a man who, as a joke, changed the name of comedian and actor Russell Brand’s mother on Wikipedia from Barbara to Juliet. When Brand took his mother as his date to the Academy Awards shortly after, the Los Angeles Times ran the online headline over their picture: RUSSELL BRAND AND HIS MOTHER JULIET BRAND. . .
I remember sitting on the couch at Tucker Max’s house one January when something occurred to me about his then on-and-off-again bestseller. “Hey, Tucker, did you notice your book made the New York Times list in 2006, 2007, and 2008?” (Meaning the book had appeared on the list at least once in all three years, but not continuously.) So I typed it up, sourced it, and added it to Wikipedia, delineating each year.* Not long after I posted it, a journalist cribbed my “research” and did us the big favor of having poor reading comprehension. He wrote: “Tucker Max’s book has spent over 3 years on the New York Times Bestseller List.” Then we took this and doubled up our citation on Wikipedia to use this new, more generous interpretation.
This is a cycle I have watched speed up but also descend into outright plagiarism. I can’t divulge the specifics, but I commonly see uniquely worded or selectively edited facts that paid editors inserted into Wikipedia show up later in major newspapers and blogs with the exact same wording (you’ll have to trust me on when and where).
Wikipedia acts as a certifier of basic information for many people, including reporters. Even a subtle influence over the way that Wikipedia frames an issue—such as criminal charges, a controversial campaign, a lawsuit, or even a critical reception—can have a major impact on the way bloggers write about it. It is the difference between “So-and-so released their second album in 2011” and “So-and-so’s first album was followed by the multiplatinum and critically lauded hit . . .” You change the descriptors on Wikipedia, and reporters and readers change their descriptors down the road.
A complete overhaul of one high-profile starlet’s Wikipedia page was once followed less than a week later by a six-page spread in a big tabloid that so obviously used our positive and flattering language from Wikipedia that I was almost scared it would be its own scandal.
It’s why you have to control your page. Otherwise you risk putting yourself in the awkward position a friend found himself in when profiled by a reporter at a national newspaper, who asked: “So, according to Wikipedia you’re a failed screenwriter. Is that true?”
It’s not a stretch to convince anyone that it’s easy to become a source for blogs. Cracking the mainstream media is much harder, right? Nope. There’s actually a tool designed expressly for this purpose.
As I mentioned in the preface, there is a site called HARO (Help a Reporter Out), founded by PR man Peter Shankman, that connects hundreds of “self-interested sources” to willing reporters every day. It is the de facto sourcing and lead factory for journalists and publicists. According to the site, nearly thirty thousand members of the media have used HARO sources, including the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Huffington Post, and everyone in between.
What do these experts get out of offering their services? Free publicity, of course. In fact, “Free Publicity” is HARO’s tagline. I’ve used it myself to con reporters from ABC News to Reuters to The Today Show, and yes, even the vaunted New York Times. Sometimes I don’t even do it myself. I just have an assistant pretend to be me over e-mail or on the phone.
The fact that my eyes light up when I think of how to use HARO’s services to benefit myself and my clients should be illustrative. If I was tasked with building someone’s reputation as an “industry expert,” it would take nothing but a few fake e-mail addresses and speedy responses to the right bloggers to manufacture the impression. I’d start with using HARO to get quoted on a blog that didn’t care much about credentials, then use that piece as a marker of authority to justify inclusion in a more reputable publication. It wouldn’t take long to be a “nationally recognized expert who has been featured in _______, ________, and ______.” The only problem is that it wouldn’t be real.
Journalists say HARO is a research tool, but it isn’t. It is a tool that manufactures self-promotion to look like research. Consider alerts like
URGENT: [E-mail redacted]@aol.com needs NEW and LITTLE known resources (apps, Websites, etc.) that offer families unique ways to save money.*
This is not a noble effort by a reporter to be educated but an all too common example of a lazy blogger giving a marketer an opportunity to insert themselves into their story. Journalists also love to put out bulletins asking for sources to support stories they are already writing.
[E-mail redacted]@gmail.com needs horror story relating to mortgages, student loans, credit reports, debt collectors, or credit cards.
URGENT: [E-mail redacted]@abc.com is looking for a man who took on a new role around the house after losing his job.
There you have it—how your bogus trend-story sausage is made. In fact, I even saw one HARO request by a reporter hoping “to speak with an expert about how fads are created.” I hope whoever answered it explained that masturbatory media coverage from people like her has a lot to do with it.
While HARO essentially encourages journalists to look for sources who simply confirm what they were already intending to say, the practice spreads far beyond that singularly bad platform. Instead of researching a topic and communicating their findings to the public, journalists from all sorts of outlets simply grab obligatory—but artificial—quotes from “experts” to validate their pageview journalism. To the readers it appears as legitimate news. To the journalist, they were just reverse engineering their story from a search engine-friendly premise.
An example: In 2015 the New York Times published a story on vaping. The reporter found her sources, apparently, by sending out the following tweet:
If you’re a teen that vapes and want to talk to a reporter twice your age about why you love it contact @stavernisesabrinat@nytimes.com
One of the responders quoted in that popular trend piece later claimed he made up all his answers, including his name! To prove that there is no such thing as irony, the hoaxer admitted all this to Gawker, who just a few days later would post their own trolling “tell us what we want to hear” call for sources in order to write a piece about BuzzFeed. Even worse was the BBC reporter who tweeted that they were looking for someone to comment on Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance. Someone replied recommending that the reporter speak with a fan and tagged someone who might work, but the reporter responded by revealing their true intentions, “I don’t want a real fan—just someone who can say it was inappropriate that her performance was political.”
Far too many stories are created with this deliberately manipulative mind-set. Marketing shills masquerade as legitimate experts, giving advice and commenting on issues in ways that benefit their clients and trick people into buying their products. I constantly receive e-mails from bloggers and journalists asking me to provide “a response” to some absurd rumor or speculative analysis. They just need a quote from me denying the rumor (which most people will skip over) to justify publishing it. The agenda has already been set, and the reader is being set up to be fooled.
A few years ago, I got tired of a speed trap camera near my house and decided to do something about it. Now, I could have gone to a public hearing, voiced my objections to these cameras, and hoped that someone in the media might report on it. But that would have left too much up to chance. Instead, I e-mailed a reporter at the Times-Picayune—the struggling but influential daily newspaper in New Orleans—who I knew had covered this beat before. I explained to him that I was a new resident to the city who had gotten dozens of unfair tickets (including three in one day). I emphasized what an undue financial burden such tickets had been on my girlfriend when she had gotten some herself and how she’d been reduced to tears by a rude city employee when she protested. I sent in a picture of a busted sign near the camera. I played the victim, saying that I felt shaken down, as if a bully had taken my lunch money.
Now, these things were true, but still, I deliberately framed them in the most sympathetic way. I made it seem like I couldn’t afford the tickets (I could) and I was clearly very biased—I was angry and wanted to get back at someone. The result: A week later, a front-page story in the Times-Picayune, featuring the picture I’d taken and my bully quote in huge block letters, which spurred hundreds of comments and a ton of other coverage. A month later, the city announced it was changing course on the policy and state legislators debated banning the cameras altogether. Of course, I’ve also seen it go the other direction. A disgruntled ex-employee can make themselves seem very sympathetic, and reporters rarely ask why this person might be suddenly so eager to talk to them. This is something companies need to be very careful about.
I once gave a talk to an association of pork farmers about this very issue. They were tired of being slammed in the press by vegetarians and other animal rights activists. I’m not a supporter of factory farming, but I empathized with their position. Biased sources were always going to be more sympathetic as sources than big rich farmers ever will be. The same thing was true about the Gawker story I mentioned above—the writer was actively looking for disgruntled ex-employees of BuzzFeed to anonymously attack their old company.
As I was gathering up press done on me personally over the years, I came across an article I’d forgotten. I’d posted a question on my blog: “What is the classic book of the ’80s and ’90s?” It was a discussion I’d had with several friends; we were wondering what book teachers would assign to students to learn about this era fifty years from now. This discussion was picked up and featured by Marginal Revolution, a blog by the economist Tyler Cowen, which does about fifty thousand pageviews a day. His post said:
What is the classic book of the ’80s and ’90s?
BY TYLER COWEN ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2008 AT 6:42 PM IN BOOKS | PERMALINK
That’s Ryan Holiday’s query. This is not about quality, this is about “representing a literary era” or perhaps just representing the era itself. I’ll cite Bonfire of the Vanities and Fight Club as the obvious picks. Loyal MR reader Jeff Ritze is thinking of Easton Ellis (“though not American Psycho”). How about you? Dare I mention John Grisham’s The Firm as embodying the blockbuster trend of King, Steele, Clancy, and others? There’s always Harry Potter and graphic novels.
Coming across this struck me not only because I am a big Tyler Cowen fan but because I am also Jeff Ritze. Or was, since that’s one of the fake names I used to use and had apparently e-mailed my post as a tip to Marginal Revolution. Of course Jeff Ritze was thinking about Bret Easton Ellis—he’s one of my favorite authors. I even answered a variant of that question as me—Ryan Holiday—a few years later for a magazine that was interviewing me.
I had been the source of this article and totally forgotten about it. I wanted traffic for my site, so I tricked Tyler, and he linked to me. (Sorry, Tyler!) It paid off too. A blog for the Los Angeles Times picked up the discussion from Cowen’s blog and talked positively about “twentysomething Ryan Holiday.” Marginal Revolution is a widely read and influential blog, and I never would have popped up on the Los Angeles Times’s radar without it. Best of all, now, when I write my bio, I get to list the Los Angeles Times as one of the places I’ve gotten coverage. Score.*
Why did Jeff Ritze manage to appear as a media source? Why did Ryan Holiday, the guy writing a book on media manipulation, not raise any flags on HARO? Because no one has time to check these things out. Epstein’s line about journalists being wholly dependent on sources was true in 1975, but over forty years later, bloggers are even more dependent and have even less time for vetting.
At the New York Observer, where I am an editorial adviser, it has been exhausting to watch pranksters and liars prey on reporters. In 2015 a marketing agency named Boogie created an April Fool’s prank around an app called Chute, which apparently prevented your iPhone from breaking. The only problem was that they pulled this prank in March. The founder played a convincing character and told a compelling story, which the company then revealed and apologized for after the story ran. A year or so later, another hoax occurred over a Kickstarter campaign for a fake app called Adoptly (essentially Tinder for adoption and fostering).
What the Observer writer explained in her piece about falling for the first hoax explains what a tough position reporters are in:
The Observer regrets our error. We admit we should have spotted a few red flags, like Chute’s limited Twitter following, and the fact that Chute’s “ founder” sounded oddly monotone when we interviewed him over the phone.
But we must note that unlike several recent media stunts, our story on Chute was not the product of overly credulous re-blogging. Boogie constructed an entire landing page and imaginary founder of the app, replete with screenshots and mock-ups of the product. The Observer interviewed the fictitious founder, played by Boogie’s in-house product manager, but he lied over the phone, and in his answers to follow-up questions via email.
While there were some red flags, writers don’t have time to check all of them. In 1975 a reporter might have had a few days to work on a piece; now they have a few minutes. There is also a complicated dance between the source and the reporter. A source is interested in seeing the story happen because it’s good for their business, and often the blogger is interested in seeing it go the exact same way—because their business is publishing stories, not saying no to potential scoops. They suspend disbelief because it’s good for business.
I like to point out a Gizmodo story where the site fell for a hoax and got thirty thousand pageviews for its poorly researched story headlined malfunctioning cake ruins party and spews liquor all over oil tycoons.3 They then followed up after the prank was revealed with a story titled viral video of shell oil party disaster is fake, unfortunately and got ninety thousand pageviews out of it.4 That’s two stories instead of zero—so do you see why they don’t question sources?
Manipulators and self-promoters, on the other hand, pray this kind of due diligence never happens. And sadly, they know it likely won’t.
*I hope you can also see how a deliberate leak could be used to create a distraction *cough* Trump’s 2005 tax returns *cough*. Who would resist? Even if the intentions are so transparent, a juicy enough scoop can’t be ignored.
*On occasion I have instructed a client to say something in an interview, knowing that once it is covered we can insert it into Wikipedia, and it will become part of the standard media narrative about them. We seek out interviews in order to advance certain “facts,” and then we make them doubly real by citing them on Wikipedia.
*Ten days later the reporter generously gave a second marketer a chance at the same story, with this request: “URGENT: [E-mail redacted]@aol.com needs NEW or LITTLE known app or website that can help families with young kids save money.”
*To make it weirder, I saw recently that someone else using the name Jeff Ritzo left a negative review on Amazon about one of my books.