RUSS SMITH: Payday Publishers — The future of journalism is right under your nose.
Lots of journalists, I’d guess, saw the unintentional rib-tickler Guardian story last Saturday about the down-for-the-count Rolling Stone offering “thought leaders” to publish in its pages—for a fee of $2000. Man, that takes “sponsored content” (RS owner Penske Media Corporation took pains to note that these “sold” articles would be labeled as such, in order to differentiate them from the other stories, which, as always, might be viewed as free ads) to a new level! I’ve no idea what success the magazine will have in attracting “big names”—pardon, “thought leaders”—to the last-ditch revenue gambit, but it’s not much of a draw. After all, who reads Rolling Stone in 2021?
(An early subscriber, a year after Jann Wenner launched RS in 1967, I couldn’t wait for the new issue to arrive, up until about 1974. When the magazine moved from San Francisco to New York in 1976, and shamelessly sucked up to the Jimmy Carter campaign, blowing Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell, I moved to sporadic reading; by 1985, when Spin was far more vital in critiquing music and pop culture, I stopped reading almost completely, occasionally picking up a copy at newsstands, like RS a vestige of the 20th century.)
My friend and colleague Crispin Sartwell touched on this subject in September 2019, disparaging the daily ghost-written op-ed columns in major newspapers. (He jokingly added that such promotional drivel was depriving real writers—like him!—from landing on once-prestigious pages.) Sartwell ticked off the names of politicians or celebrities whose byline was attached to anodyne, agenda-driven essays that added little to the publications: people like Jane Fonda, Rahm Emanuel, Lindsey Graham, Leon Panetta, Cindy McCain, Liz Cheney, Rashida Tlaib, Mitch McConnell, James Comey and on and on and on. He wrote: “Even if your own columnists fail… that doesn’t mean that you should allow your newspaper to be directly annexed to someone’s political career or publicity machine.”
I’d wager if Crispin were to re-visit the subject today, he’d come to the same conclusion as me: in the near-future—as I noted, Rolling Stone matters little, but its gimmick will have ramifications—ghost-written articles by politicians/celebrities will be for sale, and labeled as such. I’m not sure why a newspaper like The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal or New York Times would want to foul their editorial pages with such drivel, but a buck’s a buck. This is modern “journalism” and it’s getting worse not at annual pace, but monthly.
As always, life imitates Monty Python: “The BBC wishes to deny rumors that it is going into liquidation. Mrs. Kelly, who owns the flat where they live, has said that they can stay on till the end of the month, and we’ve just heard that Huw Weldon’s watch has been accepted by the London Electricity Board and transmissions for this evening can be continued as planned.”