The Blurry Line Between Journalism and PR

The line between journalism and public relations can be fuzzy, and news organizations have wrestled with that problem for some time. However, that line recently has become more blurred than ever, with some publications enlisting armies of nonprofessional scribes to satisfy an insatiable appetite for content.

It's easy to understand why the problem has mushroomed. Demand for copy has gone up. The number of people to produce it and the revenue it generates have gone down. The result has been the rise of business models that embrace dubious editorial practices in the pursuit of fatter bottom lines.The Blurry Line Between Journalism and PR

One such practice is the use of contributor networks to fill Web pages. Networks of writers, usually with some measure of expertise in a subject, have become attractive to some publishers because they often can pay nothing or next-to-nothing for the content. They're attractive to subject experts, too, providing them with opportunities to get their bylines in prominent publications.

Since those networks largely depend on voluntary disclosure policies to vet contributors, the practice is ripe for abuse, as Stephen Gandel discovered several years ago, when examining contributors to financial websites.The Blurry Line Between Journalism and PR

"In the past year or so, several finance websites -- including Forbes.com, Seeking Alpha, Wall St. Cheat Sheet, and others -- have published The Blurry Line Between Journalism and PRarticles by authors who were allegedly paid to promote the stocks they were writing about," he wrote in a 2018 article