DISCLAIMER:

This document does not meet current format guidelines Graduate School at the The University of Texas at Austin. of the It has been published for informational use only.

Copyright by Joshua Eric Miller 2017

i The Report Committee for Joshua Eric Miller Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report:

Publishers, Brands and the Freelancers in between: Journalistic boundaries in the age of sponsored content and the gig economy

APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Supervisor: Wenhong Chen

Rosental Alves

ii Publishers, Brands and the Freelancers in between: Journalistic boundaries in the age of sponsored content and the gig economy

by

Joshua Eric Miller, BSJ

Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degrees of

Master of Arts Master of Business Administration

The University of Texas at Austin May 2017

iii Acknowledgements

First I would like to express deep gratitude to my report advisor Dr. Wenhong Chen, one of the first and most influential people I met at the University of Texas. Dr. Chen taught me about the power of interpersonal ties in her Social Capital and Social Networks course my first semester of graduate school. She repeatedly reinforced their value over the next three years, as a teacher, supervisor and voice of encouragement. Without her timely and thorough feedback, patience and motivation, this report would have been impossible. Her humor always helped too. I also would like to thank second reader Rosental Alves, who pushed me to learn more about emerging business models in journalism and consider their implications for the profession. His knowledge of and authority in the field opened new paths to be discovered as well as many doors that otherwise may have remained closed. He is pretty funny as well, I guess. Lastly, I must acknowledge all of the research participants who gave their time and shared their stories. Their commitment to education and their crafts is inspiring.

iv Abstract

Publishers, Brands and the Freelancers in between: Journalistic boundaries in the age of sponsored content and the gig economy

Joshua Eric Miller, M.A./M.B.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2017

Supervisor: Wenhong Chen

As procedures and ethics surrounding native advertising and sponsored content creation coalesce, this report explores journalistic boundaries, performances of professional identities at the organizational and individual levels of content production, and relationships between stakeholders in an increasingly freelance economy. I build on the scholarship of journalism and mass media researchers, such as Mark Coddington, Nicole Cohen and Cynthia Meyers, by examining how changing business models in news publishing interact with expressed occupational values, labor practices and industry configurations. To supplement existing literature and broaden its universe of investigated contexts, I apply a mixed methodology. Over the course of my study, twelve freelance or institutional content creators participated in qualitative interviews. An analysis of the discourse constructed by startup content studio Contently, as well as its contractor network, added further perspectives. The findings indicate an individualization of responsibility for maintaining news-business divides and transparency in an age of v freelance-produced sponsored content. Beyond corporate suites and audience-facing texts, negotiations between public-interest reporting and financially motivated messaging involve hybrid journalist-marketers. This report contributes to industry practitioners’ and academic observers’ conceptualizations of the evolving content production landscape by considering how, in light of developments around boundaries and labor, myriad stakeholders are repositioning and rebranding themselves. It concludes by offering recommendations for theoretical and practical next steps.

vi Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1 Background: Sponsored Content and the Current State of Journalism ...... 3

Research Questions ...... 13

Literature Review ...... 14 Journalistic Boundaries and Sponsored Content ...... 14 Practitioners’ Professional Identities: Truth, Trust and Transparency ...... 18 Organization-Content Creator Relationships ...... 21

Research Methodology ...... 25

Research Analysis ...... 30 Boundaries: Practitioners and their Practices ...... 30 Boundaries: Responsibility and Guidelines ...... 33 Writer-Advertiser Relationships ...... 37 “The Freelancer Lifestyle” ...... 41

Discussion ...... 48

Limitations ...... 55

Conclusion ...... 57

References ...... 61

vii Introduction

“Sponsored content,” an iteration of “native advertising” (see Conill, 2016) that mimics journalism, is one of several new or recently refashioned alternative revenue streams for news organizations (see Meyers, 2015; Cohen, 2016). In its text-based form, sponsored content resembles editorial articles in appearance and tone, and predominantly is integrated, with discrepancies in disclosure, into the digital publications of legacy print and internet native media outlets. Still emerging in prominence and as a process, sponsored content creation has yet to acquire “codes of best practices, industry guidelines, or standards that more mature types of advertising enjoy” (Sweetser, Ahn, Golan & Hochman, 2016, p. 1452). Its implications for journalism stakeholders, from institutions and advertisers to individual practitioners and audiences, likewise, remain matters for debate (Coddington, 2015). The rise (or rebirth) of sponsored content coincides with decades of downsizing at editorial publishers (Mitchell & Holcomb, 2016; Vernon, 2016), and their growing reliance on freelance laborers (see Carr, 2013; Cohen, 2015), the same contractors who in some cases also create sponsored or other forms of content for brands. Scores of actors, meanwhile, have entered this fray as intermediaries between media organizations, advertisers, individual content creators and readers. One such company analyzed in detail below, Contently, connects thousands of independently employed journalists in its network with news editors and marketers. To advance knowledge in the fields of journalism, advertising and media studies, this report takes a critical look at sponsored content production, its makers and its significance for the news industry. Specifically, the study interrogates journalistic boundaries that have, if nothing else, professed to shield news coverage from financial considerations in order to protect its perceived autonomy and credibility. I also inspect

1 the performances of professional identities at the organizational and individual levels of content production. This informs consideration of occupational value redefinition, the assigning or assumption of responsibility for upholding those values, and how their maintenance is communicated. Attention also is paid to relationships between organizations and individual contractors, with particular emphasis on recent entrants to the arena of sponsored content creation. My work builds on the scholarship of journalism and mass media researchers, such as Mark Coddington, Nicole Cohen and Cynthia Meyers, by examining how changing business models in news publishing interact with expressed occupational values, labor practices and industry configurations. The literature on freelance content creators in these disciplines is sparse. Interventions in the creative industries (see Neff, 2012; Watkins, in press) as well as those from primarily Canadian (Cohen, 2015; 2016) and European (see Deuze, 2007; Frohlich, Koch & Obermaier, 2013; Gollmitzer, 2014; Obermaier & Koch, 2015) points of view are notable exceptions. To supplement these teachings, I bring in the American context. This study also broadens the universe of perspectives applied to these themes by more closely scrutinizing, through their messaging, brokerage entities between writers and sponsors. A mixed methodology therefore was employed. A group of 12, comprising seven freelance writers and five topical experts with experience working at organizations engaged in journalistic and sponsored content creation, participated in qualitative interviews. An analysis of the discourse constructed by startup content studio Contently, as well as its contractor network, added further depth. My findings indicate an individualization of responsibility for preserving news- business boundaries, and an incomplete implementation of transparency, a core value described by journalism professionals in an age of freelance-produced sponsored content. 2 Furthermore, negotiations between public-interest reporting and financially motivated messaging occur outside of more discussed realms at the macro-ownership and textual levels of analysis. Increasingly these deliberations involve hybrid journalist-marketers and other organizational representatives with varying degrees of agency over, and affiliation with, editorial and sponsored content. This report contributes to industry practitioners’ and academic observers’ conceptualizations of the evolving content production landscape by considering how, in light of developments around boundaries and labor, myriad stakeholders are repositioning and rebranding themselves. It concludes by offering theoretical and practical next steps.

BACKGROUND: SPONSORED CONTENT AND THE CURRENT STATE OF JOURNALISM

In an era of “post-truth” (Wang, 2016) and “alternative facts” (Bradner, 2017), from the Oval Office (Marcus, 2017) to Facebook feeds and users (Silverman, 2016) around the world, multitudes of men, women and machines struggle to discern what constitutes “fake news,” as well as to define who creates it. The debate over veracity in political reporting, however, is but one of the dialogues constructing the meaning of “real journalism” today. In a study from the Stanford History Education Group (2016), lead researcher Sam Wineburg and his colleagues analyzed student perceptions of phony news and other forms of questionable or quasi journalism. They found more than 80 percent of middle school students failed to discern between native advertising or sponsored content and “real” editorial-style articles. More than three-fourths of adults who regularly use the internet, meanwhile, fail to recognize sponsored content as being bought or influenced by advertisers, and more than half disclosed feeling deceived by native advertising in the past (Lazauskas, 2016a). The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 2015 created a set of

3 best practices for native advertising, which it defined as “content that bears a similarity to the news, feature articles, product reviews, entertainment, and other material that surrounds it online” (FTC, 2015), to standardize the form and reduce its deceptiveness. Yet an estimated 70 percent of native ads violate the FTC’s updated guidelines (Swant, 2016). Sponsored content is a type of native advertising (Lazauskas, 2016b) specific to publishers, social media influencers and other “cultural intermediaries” (Maguire & Matthews, 2012) in the “constellation of screen industry professions” (Lobato, 2016). Among those working in the production of journalism and native advertising, two particular pieces of sponsored content from The Atlantic and The New York Times stand out in spotlighting the respective pitfalls and potential of publishing editorial-like articles that are paid for by advertisers (Schauster, Ferrucci & Neill, 2016). A 2013 post purchased by The Church of Scientology on The Atlantic’s website (see Illustration 1) serves as a common cautionary tale (see Coates, 2013; Wemple, 2013; Snow, 2013). The Atlantic quickly removed the piece, running an apology (Raabe, 2013), after readers and journalists questioned its criticality and the moderation of user comments (Moos, 2013). A 2014 paid-for post about women inmates (see Illustration 2), purchased by Netflix to promote its thematically related show Orange Is the New Black, on The New York Times’ website (Deziel, 2014), conversely, is celebrated by industry professionals as a success for its replication of journalistic style reporting (see Moses, 2014; Sebastian, 2014a). Over nearly a year, the native advertisement surpassed the traffic of more than an estimated 98.5 percent of all content on the Times’ website, including editorial articles (Vinderslev, 2015). Screenshots of these two sponsored content pieces, or “paid posts,” appear in consecutive illustrations below.

4

Illustration 1: Church of Scientology-sponsored post on TheAtlantic.com in 2013

Illustration 2: Netflix-sponsored post on NYTimes.com in 2014 5 Media industries and advertising history scholar Cynthia Meyers (2015) places native advertising and “brand journalism,” or content that resides on the domain or social media accounts of companies and other organizations, within the larger branded content ecosystem, which includes online videos, short and feature-length films, web series, television programs, podcasts, videogames and virtual reality experiences, among other media formats. Examples of firm-hosted brand journalism are the Casper mattress company’s sleep news site Van Winkle’s (see Illustration 3), energy drink maker Red Bull’s active lifestyle magazine The Red Bulletin, and men’s grooming magazine Five O’clock from shaving products company Harry’s.

Illustration 3: Casper mattress company’s Van Winkle’s is a brand journalism example

6 Content marketing assumes many compositions and definitions, including branded or brand-produced content, which is alternatively described as a container, subset and relative of branded entertainment. A report commissioned by the Branded Content Marketing Association (BCMA), and conducted by Oxford Brookes University and UK market research firm Ipsos MORI, classifies branded content as “any manifestation associated with a particular brand in the eye of the beholder” (Asmussen et al., 2016). London College of Communication lecturer Justin Kirby (2016) favors a definition derived from the IPG Media Lab and Google survey of 15,000 consumers worldwide: “Content that lives on its own, produced by and for the brand, as opposed to content produced by someone else that the brand affixes itself to.” While crucial to understanding its impact on society, audience-centric definitions of branded content open the topic to a configuration set—containing, for example, critical and promotional non-remunerated content, or “earned” media, generated by professional and amateur journalists alike, as well as other influencers—far too vast for intelligible scrutiny within the scope of this report. The definition of branded content here therefore will be limited to the aforementioned quasi-journalistic forms of native advertising, including sponsored content, and brand journalism. Among content marketers, publishers and even scholars, the uniqueness of sponsored content is a point of contention. “News production has always been subsidized by someone or something,” wrote journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen (2009). “Very rarely have users paid directly for the costs of editorial production.” News academics C.W. Anderson, Leonard Downie Jr. and Michael Schudson call native advertising “radically different” and “controversial” (2016, p. 127). Copywriter and blogger Mark Duffy (2015) satirizes competing denotations of branded content in digital advertising trade publication Digiday, before offering his own take: “Here, then, is the 7 only 100 percent accurate definition of ‘branded content’ as of this moment: IT’S ADVERTISING, you Newspeak Orwellian dillweeds.” To detach branded content from traditional advertising, many marketing professionals describe the former as being created for an audience, rather than for brand or business objectives. This is actually the distinction between “content brands” and “branded content,” according to Joe Pulizzi (2015), founder of the Content Marketing Institute and author of Epic Content Marketing (Pulizzi, 2013). Advertising tech firm Media Radar notes disagreement among publishers on the meaning of native advertising and identified nearly 40 different “implementation styles” (Swant, 2016). Some scholars see this form of advertising as deceptive and a device for corporate powers to maintain or expand their influence over information dispersion (Murray, 2005). Others, along with members and critics of the news media, question whether it erodes editorial independence and further blurs divisions, whether real or imagined, between newsrooms and their administrative counterparts. Comedian and commentator John Oliver captured this uneasiness, comparing native advertising in news contexts to the combination of guacamole and Twizzlers. “Separately they’re good,” he said (Oliver, 2014). “But if you mix them together, somehow you make both of them really gross.” Audience reactions and perceptions too are mixed. Readers of top news sites, including The New York Times, interact as or more frequently with sponsored content than with editorial content (Tadena, 2014; Vinderslev, 2015). Some news consumers rate sponsored content as trustworthy as, if not more than, Fox News and MSNBC respectively (Lazauskas, 2014). Trade association Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and market research firm Edelman Berland (2014) report entertainment and business news users are more receptive than general news users to sponsored content. Native advertising software developer Sharethrough posits sponsored content’s effect is 8 magnified by the importance 18-to-21-year-olds place on headlines—the sole reading material for 20 percent in online feeds and primary self-reported driver to articles for this age group (Robinson, 2016). At the same time testing is gauging how readers interact with sponsored content, its impact on the publishing and advertising industries similarly is gaining added attention. Hailed as a response to consumer advertising avoidance tactics, such as ad blocking software or “banner blindness” (Pollitt, 2016), and tailor-made for sharing on social media, where 62 percent of Americans now go for news (Gottfried & Shearer, 2016; Mitchell & Holcomb, 2016), advertisers increasingly view sponsored content as an effective and nonintrusive method to reach target audiences. Others cite concerns over fake news and “digital ad fraud” (Bourgeois, 2017) on platforms owned by Facebook or Google, which still attract the majority of digital ad spending (see Vernon, 2016; Bourgeois, 2017; Marshall, 2017), in arguing for journalism’s value proposition to brands. From a financial perspective, industry studies have shown content surpassing traditional advertising as the largest expense for brand marketers (IBM, 2015). Rather than renting audience attention (Briggs, 2012; Wu, 2016), advertisers now have the option of “buying their audiences” (Quittner, 2015) by leasing services from publishers and other content creators. Brands therefore pay significantly more for user clicks on sponsored content than they do for user clicks on digital banner ads (Rice, 2013). Overall, native advertising accounts for 11 percent of news media ad revenues and is expected to contribute 25 percent by 2018 (Edmonds, 2016). Some speculate native advertising will yield $36.3 billion, or 74 percent of all digital advertising spending, in the U.S. by 2021 (Boland, 2016), up from $4.3 billion in 2015 (Marshall, 2015).

9 While some skeptics remain steadfast in their concerns over sponsored content, others have converted in the face of ongoing financial difficulties for the news publishing industry. The New York Times, Washington Post, Dallas Morning News, Huffington Post, Guardian, Forbes, Time Inc. and BuzzFeed, among other publishers, all have fielded in- house native advertising units in recent years. BuzzFeed sold a reported $120 million worth of native advertisements in 2014 (Anderson, Downie Jr. & Schudson, 2016). The company’s CEO Jonah Peretti has said the service drives nearly all of his site’s ad sales, and it already accounts for 75 percent of digital ad revenues at The Atlantic (Pulizzi, 2016), and 50 percent at Slate (Lazauskas, 2016a). Branded content will put a projected $3 billion in the coffers of the global top 100 publishers alone, 44 of which are traditional magazine and newspaper publishers, in 2017 (Elkin, 2017). The Times’ in-house agency, T Brand Studio, grew its sales from $13 million in 2014 to $35 million in 2015 (Main, 2017). The 2016 figure “will be much bigger,” according to Times chief revenue officer Meredith Kopit Levien (Flamm, 2016). Despite the budgetary boost from branded content and “soaring subscription” figures for some news media organizations (Flamm, 2016), publishers’ financial futures remain uncertain, if not imperiled. Newspapers lost their pricing power for advertising as the internet broke local monopolies on information dissemination (Marshall, 2017). Diminished print advertising revenue continues to offset any gains from digital. This has coincided with waves of consolidation in news media ownership, leading to corporate board-mandated workforce reduction (see McChesney, 2015). Approximately 38 percent of U.S. newsroom jobs have disappeared in the past 20 years (Mitchell & Holcomb, 2016), and the trend appears to be continuing:

Not to play Scrooge, but the reality is 2016 was not a good year for the journalism business. Major players like The Wall Street Journal and Gannett announced 10 layoffs, and cuts are coming to The New York Times. The Guardian laid off 30 percent of its US staff, while Mashable and Univision also saw major reductions in their newsrooms. Al-Jazeera America and Gawker disappeared completely. (Vernon, 2016)

Furthermore, citizen reporters in a “redactional society” (Hartley, 2000), where editorial practices diffuse among the masses instead of congealing among recognized professionals, disrupt journalists’ domination of storytelling in society (Deuze, 2011) and sometimes compete with journalists, particularly those employed atypically (Deuze & Fortunati, 2011). Internet publishing and broadcasting surpassed newspapers as employers of Americans (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016) in 2015 (see Illustration 4).

Illustration 4: Employment trends, 1990-2016, for publishers and other industries

11 Brands too are beginning to replace traditional publishers as workplaces for content creators, including ex-journalists, and challenging news media for readers’ attention (Pulizzi, 2016). Many other brokers, including traditional advertising agencies and content marketing startups, exist between brands, content creators, content delivery platforms and audiences. One such agent, Contently, claims a freelancer network of 100,000, a large share of whom are or were journalists. Across the United States, “independent” laborers now make up more than a third of the labor force, or approximately 55 million Americans, up from 53 million in 2014 (Freelancers Union & Upwork, 2016). These figures include ‘traditional’ contractors, people employed full- or part-time who also earn income ‘moonlighting’ or freelancing, independent consultants and temporary (or ‘temp’) workers. Freelancers constitute an integral labor source both for producers of editorial and sponsored content. They come from both news and non-news backgrounds. Of the former, some have entered the freelance economy after graduating with journalism degrees, seeking supplemental wages from work in editorial publishing, or having left newsrooms as during sustained periods of downsizing.

12 Research Questions

In order to better understand the interplay between news and sponsored content production in a media economy where contractors increasingly provide a primary source of creative labor, three research questions were selected. They are intended to provide insights into evolving relationships between traditional publishers of public-interest journalism and their advertising clients, audiences and freelancer networks: 1. How, if it at all, has discourse about the conceptualization of an “editorial wall” between news and business shifted in the age of freelancer-produced sponsored content? 2. Where and how, if at all, do sponsored content creators communicate and perform their roles in “church-and-state” separation in the age of freelancer-produced sponsored content? 3. How, if at all, do publishers and freelancers formulate and negotiate norms for their practices in the age of freelancer-produced sponsored content?

13 Literature Review

JOURNALISTIC BOUNDARIES AND SPONSORED CONTENT

The history of branded content in a news context can be traced back more than a century. An early and notable example is newspaper reporter-turned-General Motors copywriter Theodore MacManus’s “The Penalty of Leadership” (1915) ‘advertorial,’ which ran in The Saturday Evening Post below a Cadillac Motor Car Company logo. John Deere’s The Furrow: A Journal for the American Farmer, founded in 1895, is thought of as one of the first brand journalism publications (Gardiner, 2013) and an ancestor of in-flight magazines. Some bloggers rewind further, calling the Bible content marketing for Christianity (Lovell, 2013; Sheridan, 2015). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company’s Camel cigarette brand and Chrysler’s Plymouth automobile brand split sponsorship of the televised News Caravan program on NBC. Meyers’s A Word from Our Sponsor (2014) historicizes branded content (and branded entertainment more broadly) on the radio. RCA viewed its subsidiary NBC as a means to sell radios, while CBS emerged as a competitor by allowing advertisers to drive programming decisions. Single-sponsor radio rose to prominence in the 1930s with brands such as Kraft cheese and Lux soap affixing their names to broadcasts. Entertainer Jack Benny alone hosted comedic programs with Canada Dry Ginger Ale, Chevrolet, Jell-O, Grape-Nuts and Lucky Strike in the show titles (Meyers, 2014; Fuller-Seeley, 2015). Balasubramanian (1994) links infomercials on 1980s TV to “masked-news,” or “hybrid messages… embedded in news sources” (p. 32), such as pharmaceutical promotional materials put forward as medical journals, appearing in the 1990s. Consistently measuring the consequences of, or return on investment from, sponsored content, or any advertising for that matter, has proven challenging for businesses, although not for lack of trying (Meyers, 2015). Academics too struggle to 14 agree on the potential outcomes for purchasers, publishers or consumers of such content (Boerman & van Reijmersdal, 2016). “Little is known about the relationship between the use of native tactics and its potential impact on organizations-public relationships” (Sweetser et al., 2016) but a growing volume of literature, including the aforementioned work of the Stanford History Education Group (2016), is beginning to fill knowledge gaps. Readers’ awareness of persuasion attempts (Brehm & Brehm, 1981; Friestad & Wright, 1994) were triggered by heightened disclosure of brands’ roles in funding sponsored content on blogs, resulting in cognitive and affective resistance that lowered brand attitudes and intent to purchase relevant products (van Reijmersdal et al., 2016). Brand attitudes toward Netflix decreased “slightly but significantly” in a test of reader reactions to one of the streaming service’s native ads (Sweetser et al., 2016). In aggregate though, on the questions of whether, and how, sponsored content disclosure impacts audience attention, critical processing, brand attitudes and purchase intent, findings are inconclusive. “Content of the disclosure, its timing, its duration, receivers’ moods, and their perceptions of the sponsored content or the endorser” (Boerman & van Reijmersdal, 2016), however, have been identified as important factors that mitigate the reception of sponsored content. In addition to disagreeing on sponsored content’s effects, academics too deviate in how they frame the concept—not unlike industry insiders and consumers. Meyers (2015) calls sponsored content “employing ‘content’ to be associated with a brand,” whether intended to “push a product” or “build brand image.” For media companies, sponsored content can simultaneously serve as product and marketing (Murray, 2005). At the onset of the internet age, newspapers treated their websites as advertising or sponsored content for their core product: the physical newspaper (Deuze, 2003). Christy Ashley and Tracy 15 Tuten (2015) itemized creative messaging approaches—including experiential, aspirational and functional—employed in branded social content. Spanish economics and communications scholars Joaquín de Aguilera Moyano and Miguel Baños-González (2016) refer to sponsored content as a commercial communication tool, relevant to and selected by consumers, that is informative and educational, while reaching an equilibrium between being brand identifiable and creating a positive consumer experience. Sponsored content is often chronicled as a step in the gradual blurring of a line between advertising and editorial (see Shrum, 2004; Carlson, 2015; Martí, Ruiz & Scribner, 2015) or a “hybrid message” (Balasubramanian, 1994) between paid advertising and free publicity. Kim Bartel Sheehan and Deborah Morrison (2009) argue disruption to traditional advertising models by digital culture audiences gave rise to sponsored content. Robert Picard (2014) foresees newer “workable” revenue models, including reconfigured forms of advertising, as potentially sustaining the news media. Kaye Sweetser and her co- authors (2016) call it a potential “knight in shining armor” (p. 1452) for publishers. Nicole Cohen (2016), on the other hand, sees sponsored content as further evidence of media outlets’ dependence on advertisers and public relations professionals as sources. Mark Coddington (2015) writes, “The most prominent and controversial realm in which the news-business boundary is being contested is the growing practice of native advertising, or sponsored content” (p. 75). According to Coddington (2015), journalism’s editorial wall is paramount to the “self-understanding of professional journalism” (p. 67). Its conceptualization traces back to the mid-1800s and is alternatively labeled a church-and-state separation, with journalists performing the role of religion to “bathe their professional values in moral purity and ascribe moral deficiency and uncleanliness to violators of those values” (p. 73). Yet this boundary has been examined less by academics than others that are “less 16 foundational” (p. 67), such as the one between the press and government, where journalism has been referred to as society’s “social cement” (Costera Meijer, 2001) and a watchdog safeguarding democracy (Weaver & Wilhoit, 1996; Downie & Schudson, 2009; Lazaroiu, 2012; Bettig & Hall, 2012). A reason for the literature gap, Coddington concludes, is a general agreement between practitioners and scholars over the importance, although not necessarily the existence of, a wall. Now though, adopting “survival and industry crisis” rhetoric (p. 78), journalists have swapped the wall for a “curtain,” the effect of which may either spur or inhibit them from confronting commercial influences on their work. Prominent political economists challenge the notion of an editorial wall, and doubt the news media is capable of impartiality or truth telling. In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (2002) argue corporations and other powerful institutions impose an implicit editorial bias on news reporting through ownership, advertising subsidies and access granting. Robert McChesney (1997) states commercial interests corrupt the news media’s ability to participate in the Habermasian “public sphere,” free from government and business interests. Ronald Bettig and Jeanne Lynn Hall (2012) tie the origin of the news business to the rise of capitalism in fifteenth-century Italy, and contemplate “the ways in which profit-making goals result in the suppression of diversity” (p. 10) still today. “The point is that the sources from which we gain much of our knowledge about the world around us are beholden to companies with a vested interest in how that world is (or is not) represented,” they write (p. 164). Joshua Gamson and Pearl Latteier (2004) assert owners will afford a platform to voices that diverge from hegemonic viewpoints only when promoting diversity aligns with their ultimate financial objectives. Ben Bagdikian (2004) cautions consolidation of media outlets constrains their economic accountability 17 to and adequate representation of the publics they profess to serve. John L. Sullivan (2013) comments, “Although a number of scholars have disputed the precise nature of what is being sold to advertisers, political economists are in general agreement that media audiences in capitalist societies are incorporated into the economic system of exchange” (p. 82). Cultural studies scholars too have attacked the legitimacy of journalists as representatives for broader populations and labeled news “the end-product of a complex process which begins with a systematic sorting and selecting of events and topics according to a socially constructed set of categories” (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke & Roberts, 1978, p. 53).

PRACTITIONERS’ PROFESSIONAL IDENTITIES: TRUTH, TRUST AND TRANSPARENCY

David H. Weaver and G. Cleveland Wilhoit (1996) hold institutional and organizational norms have greater impacts on content than journalists’ demographics and experiences. Pamela Shoemaker and Timothy Vos (2009) also ascribe limited agency to the individual “gatekeepers” but cite Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration (1979) in allowing for the possibility they may defy the “formidable forces” attempting to shape their decisions (p. 134). Michael Schudson (2010) disputes a capitalist class would have the capacity to completely control communication and change minds, as elites are contested in legal and political spheres. Mark Deuze (2009) also channels Giddens but, diverging from Shoemaker and Vos, sees news production as a dialectic or “constituent material practice” (p. 84) with cross-influence between individual practitioners and social structures, such as media ownership, organizational hierarchies, and spatial, temporal and budgetary restrictions. Deuze (2008) links the uncertainty and ephemerality of a “liquid modern” (Bauman, 2000) world to “how people make and use journalism” (p. 860).

18 Barbie Zelizer (1993) rejects the notion of journalism as a “profession” and instead casts journalists as an interpretive community bound together by discourse in the form of common narratives and “certain definitions of appropriate practice” (p. 223). Karin Wahl-Jorgensen and Thomas Hanitzsch (2009) ponder the potential for journalists to share a culture at all, given the “vast diversity of local, alternative or specialist media practices” (p. 13). Yet professional routines, editorial procedures, and socialization processes are similar in many newsrooms across the globe, even though significant differences exist between national journalistic cultures (Hanitzsch, 2007). Much of the scholarship on journalistic ethics creates quadrants of ideologies or approaches (see Plaisance, 2005; Keeble, 2005) with differing attitudes toward and degrees of adherence to professional codes. Hanitzsch (2007) proposes journalists’ role perceptions differ along three dimensions: interventionism (i.e. activist versus disinterested), power distance (i.e. adversarial versus propagandist) and market orientation (i.e. consumerist versus civic). Famed reporter and author of Public Opinion (1946), Walter Lippmann urged his peers to follow a “common intellectual method and a common area of valid fact” (Hermida, 2015). In their book Elements of Journalism, authors Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel (2014) assert journalism’s primary principle is providing citizens “a practical and functional form of truth” (p. 42), rather than one that is scientific or absolute in any way, “without fear or favor” (p. 91) through the verification of facts. According to a Pew Research Center report (Barthel & Gottfried, 2016), most Americans agree that fact- checking is a core responsibility of the professional news media but disapprove of added interpretation (thus declining to consider verification as an act of interpretation). This representation of the press as a uniquely positioned and qualified purveyor of truth fits portrayals of professional reporters’ common self-image from journalism studies (see 19 Deuze, 2003; Karlsson, 2010). Through core normative practices such as verification, journalists “claim a special kind of authority to define reality and tell audiences what really happened” (Hermida, 2015, p. 38). Deuze (2005) articulates a “shared occupational ideology among newsworkers” (p. 446) comprising the following elements: a public- service orientation, objectivity, autonomy, speed, and ethics. Practitioners, however, diverge in their perception of truth, conceiving of it either as more absolute or subjective, and justifications of truth claims by emphasizing either empiricism or analysis (Hanitzsch, 2007). Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter’s The Media Elite: America’s New Powerbrokers (1986) reasoned individual journalists’ inherent biases, influenced by their social backgrounds and personal values, sometimes subvert their professional identities. Trust is granted to those perceived as credible, a concept comprising the “broad journalistic normative values” of authenticity, accountability and autonomy (Hayes, Singer & Ceppos, 2007). Credibility is a premium asset for news workers (Coddington, 2015), one editors have long suspected advertisers of borrowing or seizing (Cameron & Ju-Pak, 2000). Native advertising, likewise, is described as “the practice by which a marketer borrows from the credibility of a content publisher by presenting paid content in a form and location that matches the publisher’s original content” (Wojdynski & Golan, 2016, p. 1405). Greater audience participation in the production of news (see Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins & Deuze, 2008), through activities like commenting on and verifying articles, can bolster credibility “for those news media primarily engaged in verifiable journalism” (Anderson et al., 2016, p. 119), but “the idea that the press had been a perfectly trusted pillar of mainstream, neutral, moderate, responsible news reporting is largely an illusion” (p. 57). News workers’ credibility traditionally has been tied to their employers’ reputations but is less so in a digital world (Hayes, Singer & Ceppos, 2007). 20 Increasingly “the old, corporate brands are now less powerful than the brands of individual journalists themselves” (Anderson et al., 2016, p. 149). As digital news distribution increased, “journalistic objectivity” as a surrogate for legitimacy was replaced by “transparency,” which requires professional routines to be followed as well as communicated to, and understood by, audiences (Karlsson, 2010). Sponsorship disclosure is one such routine. Bloggers can harm or enhance their credibility with readers, for example, depending on how they phrase sponsorship disclosures (Carr & Hayes, 2014). Along with disclosure, brand presence, clarity of the sponsor and lack of deception have been found to contribute to consumers’ perceptions of transparency (Wojdynski, Evans & Hoy, 2017), but scholars still “know little about what consumers perceive as being transparent or clear” (p. 3). Building on Zelizer’s work, Nikki Usher (2010) analyzed various written artifacts, including emails and blog postings, from journalists who had left the industry both involuntarily and of their own volition. Her study identified among participants a belief that journalism in practice had abandoned—or possibly never adhered to—their ideals, and an allocation of blame for the disconnect to the whims of Wall Street and winds of economic change. Also citing consolidation of newspaper ownership under corporations that prioritize shareholder returns, John McManus (1997) called the concepts of individual journalistic autonomy and adherence to ethical codes “fantasy” that “deceive the public by deflecting criticism from owners onto their employees” (p. 6).

ORGANIZATION-CONTENT CREATOR RELATIONSHIPS

A rich body of creative industries literature illustrates post-Fordist metamorphoses in working conditions, as Western economies transitioned away from manufacturing, and before that agriculture, to more knowledge or information based

21 alignments (Harvey, 1989). Journalist is but one of the many newfangled professions often cited as part of the “creative class” (Florida, 2002), along with advertising professionals, academics, artists, lawyers, and software engineers, among others. Some have argued these concepts are reproductions or adaptations of Jacob Mincer’s (1958) theories on human capital and income inequality perpetuation (Freeman, 1996; Bozeman, Dietz & Gaughan, 2001; Peck, 2005). Gina Neff’s Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries (2012) picked up Ulrich Beck’s (1992) ideas of a “risk society.” She argues changing employment practices in the creative industries privatized economic risk, transferring it from employers to employees, particularly contractors. In this environment, freelance creatives increasingly depend on the social capital (Bourdieu, 1986) they develop through small talk and socialization with peer micro-networks (Clare, 2013). Firms often promote and profit from their employees’ off-the-clock networking activities but neglect to compensate them (Nixon & Crewe, 2004). Such behavior further blurs work-leisure boundaries (McRobbie, 2002; Scholz, 2013). The scholarship that exists in a cultural studies of news production tradition largely ignores journalists’ working conditions (Hanitzsch, 2011), skewing instead toward their role perceptions and constructs of the profession. This literature, furthermore, often freezes out freelancers, frequently restricting its purview to full-time employees as subjects and the newsrooms of elite metropolitan media organizations as sites of analysis (Bew, 2006; Wahl-Jorgensen & Hanitzsch, 2009; Gollmitzer, 2014). This exclusion occurs as more “journeyman journalists” (Singer et al., 2011, p. 108) increasingly work “outside formal organizations” (Anderson, 2011, p. 151), under a “model of individualized and contingent contracts” (Deuze, 2007, p. 147), in a “low-pay and no-pay” (Bakker, 2012) landscape predominantly populated by “part-timers and 22 amateurs.” Of the limited studies on freelance journalists, several have found participants to feel more autonomous than their traditionally employed counterparts (Lee-Wright, Phillips & Witschge, 2012; Cohen, 2015). Freelancers’ comments, however, may be “performative” (Ryan, 2009; Gollmitzer, 2014). Their reports of greater autonomy could be a myth (Edstrom and Ladendorf, 2012), as contingent reporters’ flexibility and independence can be “undermined by precarity” (Cohen, 2012, p. 148; see also Cohen, 2016) or offset by unremunerated preparation time, added legal risks (Lee-Wright et al., 2012), and uncertainty around employment and benefits (Ryan, 2009; Gollmitzer, 2014). German researchers provide the scholarship most germane to this study on independent contractors creating both editorial and branded content. German freelancers who simultaneously “moonlight” in public relations are “inclined to preserve their professional self-concept as journalists” (Frohlich et al., 2013, p. 810) while being mindful of a tension between these two roles. This awareness can contribute to “inter-role conflicts” that engender professional insecurity, increased stress and decreased job satisfaction (Obermaier & Koch, 2015). Mirjam Gollmitzer (2014) found German freelancers to be a mix of low- and high-income earners, most of whom engage in non- journalistic activities, including creating corporate newsletters, for reasons ranging from financial sustenance to facilitation of future career moves. Interviewees were aware extra- editorial jobs paid better wages than news work and perceived them as inconsequential when self-assessing the quality of their journalistic output. Some did take steps, such as siloing topics for public relations and marketing employment, to safeguard against potential conflicts of interest. This study examines many similar aspects, such as freelancer self-identities and perceived ethical compromises, to assess them within the current American condition. Raul Ferrer Conill (2016) confirmed native advertising and sponsored content change in 23 prevalence and form, from objective to disclosure strategies or levels of deceptiveness, between national contexts in the U.S., U.K., Spain and Sweden. No comparative research on German and American freelancers’ opinions of and attitudes toward native advertising or sponsored content could be located. The prominence of and practices around sponsored content, furthermore, have transformed significantly since the German studies were published in 2014. Brands increased spending on this type of advertising, more publishers have adopted it, and new players have entered the arena. Examining how these developments, particularly the latter, impact freelancers laboring in this space is one of this study’s contributions to the German literature.

24 Research Methodology

This report adopts as its theoretical foundations John Caldwell’s “cultural studies of media production” approach, and Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren’s media industries framework, including Meyers’ aforementioned scholarship in this field. Little mid-level “human subjects research” (Caldwell, 2009)—to complement “the top-down macrosocial perspectives favored by, say, political economists” (p. 200)—has been done to chart the “critical industrial practices” (Caldwell, 2006) of sponsored content worker groups. Citing Thomas Streeter (1996), Victoria Johnson (2009) urges media industries researchers to think of cultural forms (and specifically television) as “something people do” (p. 57) in order to envision them as sites of struggle and better contextualize emerging media applications. In the face of transitioning products, structures, taste and value hierarchies, and external realities, furthermore, interdisciplinary media industries scholarship casts culture and cultural production as a “negotiation between a broad range of stakeholders” (Holt & Perren, 2009, p. 39). To supplement the robust academic literature on ownership concentration and citizen reporting, news work scholars also have called for journalism studies researchers to investigate occupational ideology (Deuze, 2005) by taking the perspective of media outlets’ individual employees (see Deuze, 2008; Schudson, 2010; Cohen, 2012). Media management literature echoes this summons

(Redmond & Trager, 2004). This study employs interviews and discourse analysis on primary source material (see Stokes, 2012, p. 81). Twelve in-depth, qualitative interviews, of approximately 30 minutes each, were conducted by phone in March and April of 2017 (see Table 1). More than 50 people were contacted to participate. Those who agreed comprised a mix of freelance writers creating sponsored content (n=7) as well as topical experts (n=5). Some

25 members of the latter group, which includes employees of organizations using freelancers' services to create sponsored content and sponsored content consultants, formerly worked as journalists and sponsored content creators on fulltime and freelance bases. Freelancers were identified through multiple online professional registries, including Media Bistro’s freelance marketplace, the American Society of Journalists and Authors’ members catalogue, Freelance Success’ writer database, the Rockstar directory of personal finance bloggers, and LinkedIn. Interview recordings and subsequent transcriptions were scrutinized for common themes (Warren, 2002), which are outlined in the findings below. The names of the interviewees and organizations employing them have been altered to protect their identities. In-depth interviews provide “people’s ideas, opinions and attitudes” (Stokes, 2012, p. 92). Journalism and advertising scholars have used this method to study industry practitioners’ perceived threats of native advertising to journalism’s social responsibility fulfillment (Schauster et al., 2016), advertising ethics in relation to news reporting (Drumwright & Murphy, 2009), morality in journalism and public relations (Frohlich, Koch & Obermaier, 2013; Plaisance, 2015), and working conditions for freelance media laborers (Gollmitzer, 2014; Cohen, 2016).

Table 1: Breakdown of the 12 interview participants 26 Contently, a New York City-based startup engaged in the creation of sponsored content, was selected as the subject for further discourse analysis. Among other industry recognition, Contently has won awards for its brand publication and its content marketing platform from trade publication Digiday (2015, 2016). But Contently was selected as a subject for reasons, both strategic and practical, beyond its place in the world of content marketing. Contently argues journalism is a core component of its character. Chief creative officer Shane Snow, a reporter who hopes Contently “saves journalism” (Snow, 2011; Del Ray, 2012; Snow, 2013), is one of three co-founders, along with a tech entrepreneur and computer programmer. Prominent news publishing professionals also served as advisors to the executive team from its formation, while other journalists now hold management positions. The company operates two digital brand journalism publications, one aimed at content strategists and another aimed at freelancers. It also launched a foundation to advocate for and practice investigative reporting in 2014. “At the end of the day, the board of directors sees this as a way to differentiate ourselves,” said Snow of the impetus behind Contently’s foundation (Bercovici, 2014). “You look at companies like Warby Parker and Tom’s, they have a great time with hiring, retention, business success in general by caring about something.” A key part of Contently’s business is selling subscriptions to a database of “vetted, ready-to-work journalists” (Contently website) with a matching algorithm that professes to pair brands with appropriately credentialed writers. “The basic standard is: Do you have a rich history writing for publications with high editorial standards? Your own blog doesn’t cut it,” says Snow (Bercovici, 2014). The vetting process for freelance writers not only attempts to professionalize journalism and influence its boundaries, it also reveals more about how Contently positions journalists’ value. By considering individuals’ social capital as reflected by professional associations, as well as by Twitter 27 followers (Schnitzer, 2012), Contently emphasizes the influencer and tastemaker roles journalists play. Importantly for scholarly work, and discourse analysis specifically, Contently publishes an abundance of openly available, “extra-textual” (Stokes, 2012, p. 89) marketing materials. Objects analyzed range from proprietary blogs aimed at either prospective customers (i.e. brand marketers) or contractors (i.e. freelance writers) to online presentations and videos. Contently executives, such as Snow and editorial director Joe Lazauskas, also produce numerous first-person commentaries that are bylined both on the company’s digital domain as well as on those of third-party publishers. These too were included as primary source materials, along with verbatim comments made by organizational representatives in recorded interviews with external platforms (e.g., blogs and trade websites). Filtered quotes, whether published by the business press and trade journals or appearing in audio and video files edited by third parties, were disqualified as secondary sources. The online profiles of Contently freelancers, as opposed to those working for other branded content shops, also are more easily identifiable and locatable. Many of these profiles contain links to personal blogs or guest posts where the freelancer has written about his or her experiences with Contently and its clients. I thus supplemented the discourse analysis by looking at Contently freelancers’ bios, other professional profiles (e.g., LinkedIn) and comments on blog-style articles about freelancing for clues into their role perceptions and work conditions. These texts represent “the talk and conversation of media workers” (Stokes, 2012, p. 81) and “provide a vital resource” (p. 90) through which to observe “the industry’s own self-representation, self-critique, and self-reflection” (Caldwell, 2008, p. 5). Such publications have been employed by media industries scholars to “nuance understandings 28 of contemporary debates and to provide a sense of the prominent discourses circulating among various stakeholders at given historical moments (Holt & Perren, 2009, p. 49). All of these discursive artifacts should be understood as “operative” and “conceived” (see Morris, 1964; Titscher, Meyer, Wodak & Vetter, 2000) as well as “performative” (see Morris, 1964; Bakhtin, 1981; Fairclough, 2003). They can be interpreted as reification of journalistic self-identities, “field configuration” (Lampel & Meyer, 2008), leisure activity or even content marketing—as companies such as Contently as well as individual contractors compete in a crowded marketplace filled with strongly branded competitors (e.g. legacy publishers, ad agency conglomerates and award-winning journalists). “The history of the mass media is intimately bound up with the history of advertising,” write Bettig and Hall (2012, p. 5). Meyers’s A Word from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio (2014) explains the early radio industry’s “complex and contradictory” (p. 13) development as influenced by jumbled motivations, beliefs, practices and positions of power of ad agencies, their executives and their personnel. Positioned between broadcasters’ and brands’ respective demands for programming and audiences, ad agencies “were arguably the most important sites of radio entertainment production in the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s” (p. 2) and the primary innovation generators “During the formative decades of American broadcasting, as genres were invented, basic structures set in place, and the industry’s cultural role extended throughout the world” (Hilmes, 2009, p. 24). In what could be thought of as digital publishing’s formative period, one marked by the emergence of sponsored content (as defined here), Contently stands in similar a “structural hole” (Burt, 1992), a sort of “non-place” (Augé, 1995) or “hybrid” culture (Couldry, 2000), between content marketing and journalism.

29 Research Analysis

Synthesis of participant interviews and company discourses reaffirm previous findings on the blurring of news journalism and advertising, not only at the macro- organizational and micro-textual stages, as have been the focus of most previous analyses, but also at the levels of individual laborers and the landscape in which they produce their content. At the same time traditional news organization structures undergo considerable reconstructions, these traditional stewards of the editorial wall increasingly abdicate responsibility for its definition and upkeep to individual, oft self-employed, practitioners. Rather than a publisher playing the role of Mary Mapes Dodge’s little dutch boy, single-handedly (or fingered) plugging the concrete divisor that keeps the citizens of Haarlem hermetically sealed from encroaching sea waters, a current metaphor might more closely resemble journalists caught in a downpour of advertising dollars, some with umbrellas in hand to protect themselves while others take turns singing in the rain.

BOUNDARIES: PRACTITIONERS AND THEIR PRACTICES

Along with producer-delineated distinctions between journalism and marketing, these two types of content historically exhibit different formatting and stylistic conventions. Depending on the publication, certain image types, fonts and tones, for example, may have been typical of one but not the other—with the possible exception of early advertorials notwithstanding. Partitions in the age of sponsored content and the gig economy, however, are trending toward the conceptual and impermanent. Whereas legacy journalistic ethos viewed forays into marketing as permanent defections, if not acts of treason, contemporary boundary discourse frames these crossovers more in line with migrations—situational and reversible, albeit still somewhat distinctive in terms of fields and affiliations. “The thing about freelancing is that it

30 doesn’t have to be either/or,” Contently contractor and contributing columnist Nicole Dieker (2015) writes about being on both sides of the editorial wall. “Freelancing isn’t about money/love, commerce/journalism, church/state, either/or. Often, it’s about both.” Some journalists who cross the church-and-state separation divulge worrying about their reputations among peer networks (Abramovich, 2013). “Does the fact that I do advertorial or commercial writing diminish the pieces I write about social issues?” Dieker (2015) asks. “I hope not.” Personal experience with or connections to freelancers alternating between writing editorial and sponsored content were widespread among interviewees for this study. One more experienced writer, with a stronger journalistic self-identity than most others interviewed, equated this hybridity to putting on and removing different hats as dictated by situation:

My day can consist of waking up to work on a novel I’m working on and shift to working on an article for Avvo.com to writing copy for or doing an interview for Condé Nast, to having a meeting with Bank of America. It’s pretty across the board. (Hannah Williams, interview, March 10, 2017).

Those without direct knowledge of people simultaneously selling their services to news editors and brand managers likewise believed the practice to be prevalent. Organizational communication too supports this finding. Contently’s Snow himself performs, if not embodies, this duality, identifying and practicing as a journalist while proselytizing on behalf of his company’s brand and product. The company touts its freelancer network’s ties to reputable publications as a differentiator in the competitive content marketplace. According to a “talent solutions” page on its website, Contently contractors have “won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards.” More than 650 have written for the New York Times. One such person had previously worked on a bank-sponsored content project that is featured as a case study in Contently marketing communication. 31 Native advertising can itself be conceptualized as more of a boundary object, a neutral zone where the frontier between the public and commercial interests is negotiated by actors with diverse and sometimes hybrid professional identities, than a boundary. Indeed the sponsored content creators and advocates in this study with self-described journalistic pedigrees tended to tout crossover characteristics, which they defined in different terms, as best practices in native advertising.

My day can consist of waking up to work on a novel I’m working on and shift to working on an article for Avvo.com to writing copy for or doing an interview for Condé Nast, to having a meeting with Bank of America. It’s pretty across the board. (Hannah Williams, interview, March 10, 2017).

Individual freelancers were more likely than topical experts or corporate communication materials to cite specific article production techniques, such as fact verification (i.e. truth- telling) and the inclusion of multiple experts as sources, in laying out their value proposition to marketers. “I try to keep a lot of the same values I learned as a journalist,” said one interviewee. “I never plagiarize, always try to make sure the facts I’m getting, as much as I can, are from a primary source.” Calls to action, whether prompts to purchase particular products or submit personal data, constitute one element interviewees and industry communication used to sort traditional from native, strictly educational, forms of advertising. According to those interviewed for this study, however, marketers vary in their demands for product or brand names to be included in writers’ copy. Interdicts against references to competitors, their products and data, stood as the most universal distinction in practitioners’ eyes between projects conceived of as editorial and those that were not. “I guess to answer what is journalistic, I’d say you have to be looking for or looking to share multiple sides of the story and not feel compelled to exclude something from your article because it’s a competitor’s product or service,” said Lyle Howard (interview, March 22, 2017). 32 Underlying contractual details, such as who commissions an article and nondisclosure agreements, also were cited frequently.

BOUNDARIES: RESPONSIBILITY AND GUIDELINES

According to scholarly accounts and industry lore, boundaries between editorial and advertising or public relations professionals were once relatively physical and fixed. Actual walls, if not separate elevators and entranceways, literally sequestered newsrooms from sales offices. Traditional publishers have again bifurcated their journalistic staffs and in-house sponsored content-producing studios, nominally if not legally and spatially. The New York Times created T Brand Studio. The Dallas Morning News co-founded Speakeasy. These in-house studios, which work directly with advertisers and other stakeholders to create native advertising campaigns, employ teams of content creators, sales forces and administrators distinct from those of their legacy publisher parents, which nonetheless serve as sources for customer lead generation and destinations for studio output (i.e. finished sponsored content pieces). According to topical experts interviewed, editors and other managers representing publishers’ editorial sides often collaborate with their counterparts from in-house content studios, if for no other reason than to develop plans for avoiding reputational harm. Strategizing how to signal transparency at the article level, in terms of labeling of native advertising and disclosure of sponsors, is one such mutual task. Declining to utilize individuals who work on news, either as in-house staff or freelancers, in the creation of sponsored content is another mutually agreed upon rule, whether explicitly or implicitly. Organizations’ inter-publication or inter-client guidelines for freelancers, on the other hand, are less publically available or well known. Research participants described a gradual relaxing of or divergence from a leading news

33 organization’s lifetime ban on editorial submissions from anyone who had ever created sponsored content, regardless of where or for whom. Less drastic restrictions are based around timeframes, such as suspensions from news work for a certain period after accepting sponsored content contracts:

I was writing for Business Insider. I wrote for them for a month. Then I wanted to try their content marketing side, and the editor told me you have to have not written for Business Insider for a year before you can work for us on the content marketing side. (Sarah Trice, interview, March 13, 2017)

Reinforcing Gollmitzer’s findings on German freelancers’ strategies for separating editorial and public relations work, American freelancers too face constraints regarding subject matter—whether a prohibition on producing sponsored content dealing with a specific topic (e.g., politics) or topics the writer might cover journalistically. Interviewees found this unlikely or untenable though, citing contractors’ issue-specific expertise or influence as important criteria in making them attractive to brand marketers. How these rules and ideals play out in a marketplace marked by convergence and obscured by blurring lines among industries remained an unanswered question. In addition to publishers and content brokers, such as Contently, certain brands too have guidelines prohibiting contracted freelancers from writing about the company or its competitors outside of prearranged scopes of work. To supplement, if not replace, their own codes of conduct for hybrid freelancer ethics, publications are ever more relying on individual contractors’ credibility as a safeguard against perceived conflicts of interest. For Contently’s Snow (2011, 2013), sponsored content can “save journalism” by subsidizing publishers’ and professionals’ public-interest work, but maintaining journalistic integrity relies on the transparency of individual authors. Interviewees who hire freelancers to produce sponsored content for affiliated legacy publishers agreed. “We primarily use freelancers to work with our in- 34 house editors, and there’s a certain level of professional transparency expected,” said Marvin Mays (interview, March 30, 2017). “We expect that there will be no conflicts of interest.” Steve Wildstrom, who began writing branded content after leaving BusinessWeek, said he strove to “avoid subjects” where objectivity or autonomy could be compromised: “That’s how I have chosen to handle it. If I can’t be honest, I won’t write it” (Abramovich, 2013). Whether comfortable or not with the responsibility for avoiding and disclosing ties between their editorial and advertising products, interviewees believed it a reality of their trade. “I think the onus is on me,” said Judith Lopez (interview, April 3, 2017), who contributes to a digital news site and writes branded articles. “I don’t think my work with companies ever gets brought up when I pitch regular (non-sponsored) articles, unless I mention something.” Personal responsibility is not a novel concept in news reporting, as prominent past scandals attest. Former New Republic journalist Stephen Glass and New York Times journalist Jayson Blair, among others, were banished from the profession after being caught fabricating stories. Despite suffering temporary blemishes, their former employers persisted. This applies to advertising as well, where partiality that “supports and negates certain ways of thinking” (Bettig & Hall, 2012, p. 165) is assumed but statutes exist to protect consumers against false claims. But purposeful prevarications, or “distortion bias,” belong in a different bucket than partisan commentaries, or “content bias” (Scheufele, 2000; Entman, 2007). Indeed a central component of successful sponsored content, participants and other stakeholders hold, is truthfulness, albeit an often- unbalanced adaptation of it. Bias in the news business is another matter. Many journalists have been fired in recent years for revealing “decision-making bias,” or their underlying “motivations and mindsets” (Entman, 2007, p. 163), by posting political messages in public forums, although examples of reporters losing their jobs after expressing 35 preferences for certain brands or companies are harder to find. Pro-corporate bias generally is discussed less than political bias (McChesney, 2003; Bettig & Hall, 2012), and a controversial accusation when made against journalists (McChesney, 2003; Coddington, 2015). Multiple topical experts interviewed for this study portrayed a similar cleft in sponsored content, aligning with conclusions drawn by Conill (2016) about all national contexts (except for Spain, where he found political sponsored content to be more prevalent). Jolene Jenkins (interview, April 14, 2017), a consultant for digital publishing startups, indicated best practices include abstaining from native advertisements paid for by political candidates, parties or action committees. Another expert recalled receiving a job offer from a prominent news organization after counseling his potential employer to refuse a governmental body’s sponsored content request during the interview process:

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a meeting or been louder in speaking my mind for maintaining some sort of integrity. I think that was part of the reason, maybe more than part of the reason, they went with me as a candidate... It’s one of those things where my philosophy is: no should never be a flat answer for any publisher or client. It really just depends on what the endgame is, the motive is and how that can be handled in a way that makes sense for the audience. I don’t want to be a party of people who just shut down projects that seem a little bit risky. (Arthur Ruth, interview, April 10, 2017)

At the same time freelancers and brokers of their services recognize individual integrity as a firewall against impropriety, they too acknowledge it as fuel for their influence over advertisers’ target audiences. Journalists’ compelling and trustworthy content creation capabilities—“a tremendous amount of experience in storytelling and audience built in, and they have credibility with that audience” (Morgan Ace, interview, March 3, 2017)—were frequently cited by topical experts and freelancers interviewed as assets customers could leverage to build affinity with target readerships through

36 sponsored content. “I would almost always rather have someone from a journalism background, who has an editorial conscience, taking part in creating this kind of content or strategizing this type of content, as opposed to someone who doesn’t have that conscience,” said Morgan Ace (interview, March 3, 2017). One senior executive interviewed said his digital content studio’s affiliation with a legacy news organization lent his organization’s work a “halo of credibility” (Marvin Mays, interview, March 30). Contently’s CEO Joe Coleman and its board of directors see the company’s journalistic credentials as setting it apart from competitors (Bercovici, 2014; Quittner, 2015). In communication touting Contently’s contribution to brand marketing, journalist is deployed to signify purveyor of “premium” or “quality” content—differentiated from “cheap text cranked out by content farms” (Snow, 2011) or “content mills” (Baker, 2015b).

WRITER-ADVERTISER RELATIONSHIPS

While individual news workers employed traditionally at established media organizations have, to some extent, been accountable for personal conduct, they rarely have been as involved in the business of news as freelancers are today (Briggs, 2012). In agreement with findings by Gollmitzer (2014), participants tended to view interpersonal and financial exchanges with advertisers as a necessary component of the freelancing profession. Like their German counterparts, American freelancers interviewed perceived extra-editorial work as inconsequential to their journalistic storytelling or decision- making, although some participants expressed apprehension about conflicts as perceived by colleagues. Participants commonly equated contractors’ interactions with advertisers or content studio representatives to those of journalists and editors:

37 You have the editor who assigns you stories or, in this case, stories paired with an advertising sponsor. You go about your work, write your draft, and get your feedback. It’s very much like working in a newsroom with a few more stakeholders. (Morgan Ace, interview, March 3, 2017)

In addition to cultivating and catering to audiences, freelancer interviewees discussed directly courting and communicating with clients as central components of their professional lives. Outside of the content development loop, participants reported networking with sponsors at industry conferences, meeting them for meals, pitching them or responding to pitch requests through channels such as Contently, and negotiating with them over contracts. Ties with particular clients often lead to sustained revenue through repeat business or referrals, either within the organization or industry more broadly:

Almost exclusively, all of my work has come from meeting people, introducing myself to them, telling them what I do, and then forming a relationship, and then getting a gig. I’ve been lucky to get one project with a company and continue to have them as a client, and then have them refer me to other people. (Hannah Williams, interview, March 10, 2017)

One interviewee working as a content creator and editor at a prominent news organization’s in-house sponsored content-producing agency, and with budgetary authority to contract other writers, described it this way:

After a while, you can only write about this stuff so much. So I do have a freelance network of talent, whether that’s designers, video people, straight up researchers and article writers. More specifically, I would say that I am the only sole person ideating for the sponsored content studio. When it comes to post-sale production, I do defer to my network, which is about 30 to 40 people right now. It’s mostly farmed out to people I’ve worked with in the past and trust. (Arthur Ruth, interview, April 10, 2017)

Freelancers doing both journalism and sponsored content frequently described income earned from the latter as significant and a subsidizing force for their other work. “The trouble is real journalism doesn’t pay as much as content marketing, especially if you are getting on the really good agencies or high paying clients,” said Sarah Trice

38 (interview, March 13). “It’s just really hard to make a living as a straight-up journalist without doing any sort of content marketing.” In this sense, self-employed journalists’ rationalizations are reminiscent of the “survival and industry crisis” rhetoric (Coddington, 2015, p. 78) many publishers adopt as a reason for doing sponsored content:

I asked myself, when I started taking on work outside of About.com, I’m going from more journalistic writing to more marketing writing, how do I feel about that? So there was that eternal conflict. The money won me over. (Lyle Howard, interview, March 22)

Another interviewee, however, self-reported coming from a “position of financial stability.” A former financial services professional, she chooses to write sponsored content as well as a blog “to maintain relevancy in my career”:

I do like being able to keep my career going, so that’s my main goal with it. And the side income is nice. As far as the challenges, there’s not because for me. There’s not any pressure with it. If I didn’t want to do it tomorrow, I wouldn’t have to. (Grace Murphy, interview, March 10, 2017)

Many interviewees framed these relational activities within narratives of operating as a small business owner or developing a “personal brand,” a concept often conflated with attribution. “There’s been a couple of times I’ve thought maybe I can ask for this to be ghostwritten because I don’t want my name attached to it, but it’s a pretty rare concern,” said occasional journalist Judith Lopez (interview, April 3, 2017). “If someone Googles me and sees I’ve written for all these companies, I don’t think any of them make me look worse or tarnish my brand in any way.” Donald Burke (interview, April 14, 2017) expressed a desire to build a stronger brand, and thus preferred to have bylines on sponsored content. A book of bylines, or clips in journalistic parlance, often helps attract new clients, this interviewee said. Another participant shared the similar sentiments of peers:

39 I came into freelancing with a journalism background, and so many clips (writing samples), so I’m not a huge stickler in always having a byline... I have a lot of friends who don’t have as many clips as I do, and they’re really trying to build up their portfolios, and they say no to ghostwritten work. I know it is an issue for freelancers who are just starting out. Sometimes they don’t want to ghostwrite or they charge more for ghostwriting. (Sarah Trice, interview, March 13, 2017) Interviewees for whom journalism was or had been part of their self-assessed professional identity communicated stronger acceptance of or preferences for ghostwritten work:

Most of them are either pretty apathetic to the byline or a little bit leery of having that exposed, if only because most of these people do moonlight as content creators and some of them have day jobs at very established publications, where they are doing strictly editorial work. It’s one of those things where I think A, they’re not in a huge hurry to boast about doing content work for a corporate brand and then B, mostly because they do have a day job somewhere, at a publication as a writer or editor. That’s what I’m noticing at least. (Arthur Ruth, interview, April 10, 2017) Another self-employed writer with more pronounced journalistic affiliations feared some traditional publishers might balk at associations with sponsored content. “That’s like church and state to me—I wouldn’t combine the two,” said Hannah Williams (interview, March 10, 2017). “In talking to or trying to pursue anything in journalism, I would never talk about branded content work that I did.” Some interviewees noted refusing clients or projects as a strategy to avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived:

What I do is stuff I feel is of interest to me, would be of interest to my readers and something I would feel proud to publish. I think if it’s a good fit, I accept it. If not, then I don’t. I don’t work with everybody that approaches me. I don’t work with every company. I don’t accept every guest post. I read through and edit, it’s got to be something that suits my blog, my brand and my interests. (Grace Murphy, interview, March 10, 2017)

One interviewee recalled declining a contract from a financial services firm that advocates for practices with which she disagreed:

40 I think they were willing to pay a lot of money. But I felt like, you know what, at the end of the day, I really believe in financial literacy and people managing their money responsibly. I felt like saying yes to that would be compromising who I was. (Sarah Trice, interview, March 13, 2017)

Younger and less experienced writers, on the other hand, disclosed an uneasiness with turning away paid gigs—“if they’re dangling lots of money, that’s hard to turn down sometimes” (Janice Bell, interview, March 13, 2017)—and an inability to “remember the last time I said no to something” (Judith Lopez, interview, April 3, 2017). One disclosed running product reviews paid for by an electronics manufacturer, and posts sponsored by consumer packaged goods companies on a local news blog:

In the past, I got around $250 per article but I don’t know if that’s below the going rate or not. That’s what they offered per article and I accepted. They were pretty short and didn’t take a whole lot of time to research. The whole process took me two hours tops. But they were happy with my posts. (Donald Burke, interview, April 14, 2017)

Freelancers report flat rates from $200 to $1,500 per article for assignments obtained through Contently, which takes 15 percent as a commission (Faye, 2016). Contently associate editor Dillon Baker (2015a) calculated an average flat rate of $230 for branded content, noting one $1,700 outlier for submission to a branded publication. Freelancers, Baker (2015b) writes, may receive similar paychecks from large journalistic media companies for work that takes months. “Because they can offer you exposure,” Baker quotes investigative reporter Scott Carney. “The problem is that you can’t eat exposure.”

“THE FREELANCER LIFESTYLE”

In A Word from Our Sponsor, Meyers (2014) discusses how advertising agencies in the early days of radio positioned themselves as uniquely qualified to balance brands’ motivations (i.e. profits) and capabilities (i.e. selling) with those of the entertainers they hired to voice radio shows (i.e. artistry and building audiences). Sponsored content studios likewise position as brokers uniquely capable of arbitrating between brands and 41 independently employed journalists. Serving as exchange platforms, which rely on maintaining trust between marketplace stakeholders (Fisman & Sullivan, 2016), these agents concomitantly align themselves as allies to all bartering parties. Contently, for example, self-portrays in myriad ways: technology company, marketing and advertising firm, talent agency and content creator are foremost among them. Coleman tags his company a “Frankenstein business” (Quittner, 2015). First imagined as a marketplace for “new-style publishers” and writers, Contently later recognized lucrative opportunities to sell software and storytelling services to brands (Del Ray, 2012; Schnitzer, 2012). Throughout its journey, the firm has accentuated and escalated its journalistic affiliation. The non-profit investigative journalism foundation publishes “investigations” or articles, some with links to partnering publishers’ sites, “for the public good.” Contently champions the independence of its reporting arm by calling it out as a distinct corporate entity with its own board and charter. More than a name connects the for- and non-profit wings though. The foundation, hailed as a “philanthropic friend” and affiliate of the company, receives funding as well as executive leadership and volunteer labor from Contently, Inc. In addition to its business-to-business site (Contently.com), Contently also maintains a digital publication (Contently.net) called The Freelancer, which presents “tips and insights into the freelance life.” The dot-net’s favicon (i.e. the icon displayed along page names in web browser tabs), the tip of a writing utensil as the ‘A’ in Freelancer, contrasts with the copyright-like ‘C’ used for the dot-com. Prominent links on The Freelancer lead to “Build Your Portfolio,” “Rates Database,” and “Resources” pages (see Illustration 5). Contractors from Contently’s network write many of the site’s articles.

42

Illustration 5: Contently’s The Freelancer blog provides news for contractors.

According to study participants, The Freelancer and other similar publications, platforms, forums and newsletters serve as important sites for gig acquisition and also field configuration (Lampel & Meyer, 2008). Deuze (2009) describes communication portals like Contently-hosted publications as online gathering places that substitute traditional organizational support structures for younger freelancers who operate in more individualized marketplaces. Oftentimes independently employed contractors turn to these spaces, in addition to publishing and advertiser clients’ own style guides, for general recommendations on sponsored content standards or best practices:

There’s a ton of places you can go to apply for sponsored content. Those places are very, very specific in the rules and the ways you must disclose. Before you publish they’re going to look over stuff or even after you publish, they'll go in and make sure your links are right, that it’s been disclosed as an ad. When people work with a brand on their own, it’s really up to their integrity and whether they do it right, if they know to do it right, and if the company they’re working with require they do it right. I guess there would be a lot of room in there for things to not be done properly if people don’t know what to do or if they aren’t working

43 with specific advertising sponsored content companies. (Grace Murphy, interview, March 10, 2017) Conversations about specific contracts, customers or ethical dilemmas usually take place over more private channels, such as email:

I’ve had some cases where there was a potential client on Contently asking me and, I know, several others to pitch and come on board. And when I looked up the client, they had a large lawsuit against them for a consumer related lawsuit. They had misled people. So I just sent that email directly to the other writers that I knew asking, “How do you feel about this? Are you going to write for them? Here’s what I’m thinking.” I started that discussion directly with them. (Lyle Howard, interview, March 22, 2017)

Snow’s The Contently Manifesto (2011) and Baker’s writing on freelancers “fighting for their labor rights” (2015b) articulate empathy for the difficulties journalists, particularly those independently employed, face in their industry’s economic environment, as well as solidarity with their ultimate aspirations. According to Coleman (Quittner, 2015), his company is fighting to “decommodify” writing by supporting higher rates for contractors (and Contently through its 15 percent commission). Assignments sourced through pay writers approximately ten times greater on average than those of “content mills” (Baker, 2015a). The firm’s stated quest is “to empower creative people to build careers and to fund stories that keep democracy alive” (Contently homepage). The company provides free portfolio-building software to writers and commissions their work on a select number of investigative stories each year. Among Contently freelancers, “good and fast pay” as well as “a strong list of brands who use [Contently] to order content” (Roland, 2015) are perceived benefits of working with the company, which some contractors see as a “move-up mill” and a “step up” from content farms. Still, Contently contractors report large disparities in compensation, including a gender gap, and satisfaction with that compensation. More than a fifth of the firm’s full- time freelancers report incomes below the federal threshold for poverty for individuals, 44 even though 29 percent work 40 hours or more per week (Baker, 2016). A third work with brand clients out of financial necessity (see Figure 1). Contently executives and management, meanwhile, extol the benefits of an on-demand labor force to editorial publishers and brands. Snow compares the writers to bait or “the hook for us to get into these big companies with our platform” (Sebastian, 2014b). Tomas Kellner, managing editor at GE Reports, General Electric’s content-marketing site, paints a similarly dehumanizing picture: “It’s like a supermarket for writers. People like me, who need to scale up their operations, can get access to writers for a specific project” (Sebastian, 2014b). Perhaps sensing these pressures, one freelancer commented, “I just didn’t like the meat market feel of it all… Agencies seem to drive down the writing rates, hand off work I’m not completely suited for and their editing comments are practically illiterate” (Roland, 2015). Others complained the editing process was “painful” and overbearing.

Figure 1: Contently contractors’ attitudes on working with advertisers (Baker, 2016).

This polysemy, or the coexistence of multiple meanings, exists beyond just Contently’s ecosystem. Across participant interviews and public comments from

45 contractors or organizational representatives, various actors contend to define the condition of their work. Freelancing—whether described as a lifestyle, economy or employment status— in the nexus of news and sponsored content is described in complex, overlapping terms: lucrative but lonely and risky; or, liberating yet, for some, unavoidable and occasionally unfulfilling. These findings are supported by studies such as the Freelancer Union’s Freelancing in America report (2016), which quantitatively polled a broader universe of independent contractors. For example, freelancers surveyed by the union stated, on average, wages from their current work surpass those of previous full-time jobs. However, they also listed prompt payment, income unpredictability and debt as their top concerns. Money and autonomy were the two most common self-reported benefits of sponsored content freelancing among study participants. Three full-time contractors voluntarily left other jobs, in publishing and unrelated professions, after calculating their potential income if focused solely on gigs for brands. “I realized early on that there was money to be made,” said Janice Bell (interview, March, 13, 2017). “Within the first month, they needed a lot of content and I was making more writing about eight articles than I did in my day job.” Several interviewees discussed having more time to spend with family members, travel or dedicate to other pursuits, since they no longer had obligations to be in an office for a fixed number of hours each week. One interviewee characterized income and scheduling flexibility as going hand-in-hand:

The ability to be in charge of your own income is really powerful. As a freelancer, you’re in charge of how much you want to work. If you want to reach out to more companies and find more work, you can do that. If you want to scale back, you can do that too. (Sarah Trice, interview, March 13, 2017)

Yet many interviewees simultaneously noted costs or other constraints that deluded their profitability, efficiency and enjoyment. Common complaints revolved around the lack of 46 benefits associated with traditional employment: healthcare, personal development, paid vacation and camaraderie. Time spent pitching or revising articles was described as a deflationary pressure on rates and overall earnings. One interviewee mentioned these being considerations in clientele curation decisions. “If I have a client that has a lot of edits, and unless they pay much more than my average client, that’s going to be not necessarily a deal breaker but just something to factor in making sure I’m not losing money on this deal,” the person said. “People who are super nitpicky or you pitch them your ideas and they don’t like any of them, just anything that kind of takes up more time, because that could be spent pitching other people or writing, or doing more money- making things basically.” Some with journalistic backgrounds singled out sponsored content for feeling repetitive. “The thing with this space is you tend to write the same kind of content for different outlets,” said Janice Bell (interview, March, 13, 2017). “For a news outlet, you’re working with trending topics, it’s different.” Some described this type of work as inauthentic to their self-representations. “I don’t look at it like it’s something that has anything to do with me,” said Donald Burke (interview, April 14, 2017). “At the end of the day, you have to pay bills,” Hannah Williams (interview, March 10, 2017) stated, “but that’s not my preference and not the thing I would say I identify with the most.”

47 Discussion

Qualitative researchers campaign for “passing” (Couldry, 2000) studies of communities and cultures, bemoaning attempts to attach fixed or uniform depictions in a postmodern era (Akindes, 2003; La Pastina, 2003; Darling-Wolf, 2003). Such an outlook is essential for making sense of atypically employed and hybrid journalist-marketers’ indefinite senses of selfhood and unsettled business relationships. By examining how heterogeneous parties navigate and message their work in the spaces occupying and between public interest reporting and commercial advertising, and how human actors clarify or complicate popular industry or organizational narratives, I hope to have helped clarify the parties, practices and professional discourses linking journalism and sponsored content. The analysis presented above holds implications for anyone with a stake in the future of news reporting, from advertisers to audiences, and is particularly relevant to those working in the business of journalism, from traditional publishers to freelance practitioners. In addition to supporting findings from previous research on freelancers in the hybrid roles of journalist and copywriter (see Frohlich et al., 2013; Gollmitzer, 2014; Obermaier & Koch, 2015), this study’s primary contributions are threefold. First, while previous scholarship examines the blurring of journalism with sponsored content at macro and organizational or micro and textual levels, the findings here indicate similar smudging occurs at the middle tier of individual writers. Given changing economic realities in the news media and employment possibilities for content creators, many independent contractors are, by choice or force, now involved directly in managing business transactions and applying editorial concepts to the creation of advertising.

48 Second, publishers, advertising agencies and brands alike increasingly affix the burden of maintaining credibility with audiences to the integrity of freelancers in financially and professionally precarious positions—even as that integrity is being exchanged between these organizations and sold to audiences. While traditional publishers hang on to some semblances of “church-and-state” separation, by splitting responsibilities for news and native advertising production between in-house teams, they also contract freelancers who bring to their practices a mix of experiences, motivations and relationships that compete with or complement each other at different times. Finally, while news organizations and journalists emphasize transparency in branded content, through disclosure of ties between articles and sponsoring entities, as a promise kept to professional ethics and audiences, relationships between individual writers and brands often are ignored, if not obscured:

We allow [a writer byline on sponsored content] if it is something the brand agrees on and the talent, of course, agrees on, in which case we will do something to the effect of “Produced by this department for this brand, written by so-and- so.” That will always be overly evident. That’s not something we hide. We’re nothing if not overly visible about our disclaimers. That is something we will provide, if there is an agreement on behalf of the brand and the talent. Mostly it’s, as you would expect, not bylined and that’s OK with us too. Because everything else is disclosed up and down, left and right, where you look. (Arthur Ruth, interview, April 10, 2017)

Writers, of course, neither hold total responsibility for, or power in, determining how their journalistic output ultimately is presented to readers. An in-house editor or team almost always has authority to green light or reconfigure the stories their publications carry. However, ample evidence, including testimony collected in this study, exists that these gatekeepers may be uncertain of contractors’ advertiser ties or, through moonlighting, have their own.

49 How these developments, if substantiated and sustained, impact dynamics between news media organizations, producers and consumers will have to be watched. But already we can identify critical questions about credibility, responsibility and transparency in journalism. What will be the long-term impact of associations with sponsored content creation on news workers? Some evangelists of evolving business models in editorial publishing, such as digital media professor, author and entrepreneur Mark Briggs, call the wall concept antiquated and fears of corruption from journalists engaging in financial activities overblown. “Every businessperson must guard against the potential pitfalls and conflicts of interest, but mixing journalism and business in a principled way is not as difficult as some would believe,” writes Briggs (2012, p. 69). Research on interpersonal influence, such as that of psychology and marketing scholar Robert Beno Cialdini (2004, 2016), on the other hand, shows how seemingly insignificant exchanges with interested persons can predispose or sway professionals who self-identify as ethical to unwittingly make decisions that contradict their professed principles (e.g., doctors overprescribing drugs after contact with pharmaceutical reps). Journalist and author Andrew Sullivan (2013) questioned the source of a BuzzFeed sponsored article about Sony’s PlayStation 4 videogame system that was followed the next day by an unsponsored article, this one with the joint bylines of two staff writers, on the same topic. “To my eye, the two are so similar in form and content,” he wrote, adding the background color and acknowledgement of Sony as a sponsor were the only substantive differentiators. Transparency research in journalism studies historically focuses more on news sites of production (e.g., publishers) and items produced (i.e. content), with little attention on those people doing the production (Karlsson, 2010). While this paper aims to increase the scholarship library dedicated to the latter, longitudinal studies will be required to 50 draw clearer conclusions about relationships, disclosure and possible coercion in the context of freelancers sowing journalism-marketing seams. Consideration of excluded subjects, stories or information over time will be as, if not more, important than that of overt or subliminal advocacy (Bettig & Hall, 2012). Pete Wootton, managing director of British magazine company Dennis Publishing and proponent of united, in-house editorial and advertorial labor pools, illustrates one way this might occur, saying “if for example an advertiser has a product which isn’t particularly strong in one aspect of it, we would rather not talk about that and talk about a more favorable part of their product like the design” (Hansen, 2017). A blogger interviewed for this study preferred to simply not write a review at all in that instance. In the meantime, publishers’ conceptualizations of editorial walls—their judgments on and guidelines around moonlighting or temporarily crossing over—will determine who can access journalistic work, which paradoxically may affect their subsequent abilities to earn income from sponsored content. Additional answers addressing current newsroom diversity and compensation structures will have to accompany any tighter restrictions. Of course, some practitioners may be indifferent to these developments:

There’s a lot of older writers I see that started off in journalism, and they do content marketing because it pays well. They probably don’t mind the work, but they want to have some of both. The writers I’m friends with tend to be younger, and they didn’t necessarily start off as traditional journalists. I don’t think they really care as much about the prestige of writing for The New York Times or something like that. (Sarah Trice, interview, March 13, 2017) A second question is, whether or not approximation with advertisers may bias writers, will news audiences begin to know more about, take greater interest in or perceive differently individual producers’ conduct and networks? Customer demand and other market-based arguments are often cited as justifications for a switch from 51 traditional advertising models to branded content. An IAB and Edelman Berland study (2014) shows 60 percent of consumers are more open to online ads that “tell a story” versus just selling a product, and find in-feed sponsored content was the best combination of appealing/interesting and non-irritating/nonintrusive versus video, banner, expandable and pop-up ads. Sponsored content stakeholders alternatively frame these articles as devices to build trust or loyalty with and educate “citizen-consumers” (Deuze, 2008). Yet we also see evidence that readers have limited understandings of, and concerns with, native advertising and sponsored content. We therefore must consider whether they perceive and how they view any consequences. Along with “any explicit rationale for their advent,” most news articles lack information on writers’ personal biases (Karlsson, 2010, p. 542). Interviewees, however, expressed doubts over readers’ interest in journalists’ identities or potential financial entanglements. That’s if audiences even care about who really writes, or publishes, a piece of content at all. Several writers argued an article’s treatment by Google’s search engine algorithm—especially inclusion in the top three results listed—or shareability on social media matter far more than its creator. Moreover, confidence in the media is low to begin with. Only 32 percent of Americans surveyed in a recent Gallup poll (Swift, 2016) say they have even a fair amount of trust in the mass media to “report the news fully, accurately and fairly,” down from 40 percent in 2015. Findings emerging from studies on other types of cultural intermediaries, however, intimate increased awareness or suspicion of links between advertisers and content creators may have deleterious effects on esteem. Research on social media personalities, for example, reveals a decline in their influence after followers discover links to corporate sponsors. “Reputation is the principal currency of cyberspace,” writes journalist, author and social media expert J.D. Lasica (2005) on

52 the ethical costs of internet influencers. “Transparency—of actions, motives and financial considerations—is the golden rule of the blogosphere.” If, as certain stakeholders suggest, drawing and disclosing editorial-sponsored distinctions is the solution, both to inform audiences and maintain institutional integrity, considering individual content creators and shapers (e.g., editors), in addition to organizational structures and particular articles, must be part of equation. Through links on bylines, readers may be able to easily access journalists’ curated biographies or publisher-specific portfolio. Making public their current or past affiliations with third- party brands or other sponsors would add a level of transparency, both for audiences and editorial employers. Yet, for reasons stated earlier, this would have to be done in a manner that takes into account the current precariousness inherent in journalists’ individual employment and professional circumstances. They would have to be compensated in some meaningful way for the loss of privacy and potential future income. Another less invasive, but potentially less transparent, solution would be greater disclosure of the process and participants behind decisions to create and publish particular pieces of content. Critics of traditional separations (see Briggs, 2012; Hansen, 2017) argue newsroom personnel can and should be making journalistic and sponsored content. Should the verdict reveal the blurring of editorial and advertising is already complete or unimportant in the minds of news consumers, then publishers will have to embrace the notion of a single, storytelling labor force or will have to rethink what journalism is and its value proposition. Sponsored content is already differentiated from other advertising iterations by its educational nature, truthfulness and credibility. Even the creation process increasingly resembles that of news. Is journalism something a reader would, through

53 subscriptions or micropayments, take the responsibility for subsidizing? Or is it simply content that no sponsor would pay to put its brand name on? Lastly, if readers do become savvier about updated advertising iterations, will sponsored content preserve its initial advantages over other types of advertising that readers increasingly avoid? Native advertising may just be at its most effective when it is at its most deceptive (i.e. indistinguishable from editorial content). A large volume of literature on defense mechanisms against perceived persuasive messaging, including several recent studies on native advertising, suggest brands are in for disappointing returns, albeit potentially only temporarily, on their branded content investments (see van Reijmersdal et al., 2016).

54 Limitations

The small and nonrandomized sample of sponsored content writers and experts interviewed for this study complicate the generalizability of its findings. The insignificant and unrepresentative sizes of subgroups also preclude the ability to draw conclusions about prominent factions within the larger population. Multiple sects of freelance journalists and sponsored content writers, often discussed as a single body or monolith, deserve future attention and investigation (Gollmitzer, 2014; Cohen, 2016). Atypically employed content creators vary along multiple axes, including age, gender, income brackets, ideologies, the formality of their employment situation (e.g. part- versus full- time) and the nature of their aspirations. Women, for example, are drastically underrepresented in U.S. newsrooms. While forming the overwhelming majority of freelancers, moreover, they disproportionately occupy the pay scale’s low end and are excluded from its upper echelons. Contractors interviewed for this study were disproportionately white and lacked prominence in the traditional journalism profession (e.g., awards, bylines at prestigious publications, etc.). The selection of channels for interviewee identification, the impact of the researcher’s personal network on algorithmic recommendation systems employed by these channels, and self-identifying journalists’ reluctance to discuss or reveal ties to sponsored content creation may have contributed to these discrepancies. For these reasons, additional interviewees (i.e. topical experts), sources (i.e. Contently representatives and freelancers in the company’s network) and discursive objects (e.g., marketing materials, unfiltered video interviews, writers bios, blog post comments, etc.) were added to the analysis. However, more inclusive research is needed in the future to bring in a still larger and more representative set of voices.

55 Finally, this study explores an emerging and fast-evolving subject matter. As such, its conclusions risk irrelevance or obsolescence, even in the medium run. For example, I predominantly focused on native advertising and sponsored content in its text- based forms. Much sponsored content and native advertising increasingly takes the form of audio, images or videos. At The New York Times and T Brand Studio, the blurring extends to virtual reality and live event experiences, as both the newsroom and studio experiment in these mediums (Main, 2017). These media too are deserving of scholarly attention, and it is my hope that lessons learned from this project may in some way be applicable.

56 Conclusion

As politicians, pundits and other people point fingers over—and in some cases profit from—false information masquerading as accurate reporting, stakeholders in the journalism and marketing worlds continue adjusting their understanding, acceptance and deployment of sponsored content. Hayes, Singer and Ceppos (2007) found college students differentiated news media organizations from all other sources of information online “based partly on cultural habit—certain names are associated in their minds with certain functions or products—and partly on what seems to be a widely shared belief about the nature and value of journalism’s role in our society.” Five years later, David Ryfe (2012) wrote journalism was “unraveling” and lacked a stable definition. Now, Anderson et al. (2016, p. 1) opine, “everything seems up for grabs—how journalism gets produced, how it gets funded, what its public purpose is, and even what it is.” Meyers (2014) notes, a historical perspective is often needed to appropriately comprehend media business models and their impacts on culture or the public sphere. This is true. But past developments too can help confirm, challenge or add context to current insight. Indeed Meyers (2015) points out how shifting relationships between corporations and cultural intermediaries, more than a half-century ago, impacted radio professionals and the content they produced. Likewise, McManus (1997) explored print journalists’ agency vis-à-vis advertisers’ interests in a period of corporatizing and consolidating news media ownership. He, like Neff (2012), found a discursive, but ultimately misleading, transference of burden down organizational hierarchies. “Most codes imply that the journalist is a ‘professional’ free of any obligations except responsibility to enlighten the public,” McManus writes (p. 6). “And so they place full moral responsibility for news on the shoulders of individual practitioners… No mention

57 is made of executives of parent corporations with ‘cash registers in their heads’ who might bend journalists to the wills of major investors, sponsors, and powerful sources.” Similarly today—whether interpreted as survival, subversion or better service— we see publishers and brands, as well as any bridging agencies like Contently, increasingly push to blur lines between news and advertising, both in content and individuals’ professional identities. From different angles and through divergent declarations, sponsored content creators are simultaneously positioned as defenders of public-interest journalism and catalysts behind the crumbling of editorial walls. Contently is a talent agency that provides freelancers favorable working conditions and sells them to brand marketers like items in a supermarket, while freelancers long for and lament their participation. Laborers, now atypically employed in many cases, face requests to collateralize their own credibility in defense of more powerful employers’ reputations, if not sales figures, and incentives to ignore, if not obscure, cognitive dissonances that may arise from crossing editorial boundaries. The periods studied by Meyers and McManus gave way to sustained declines in the influence, culturally and economically, of the respective industries and professionals captured. Whether digital content is nearing a similar crossroads surpasses the scope of this paper. Should native advertising, on the other hand, fulfill expectations of propping up publishers and their employees, both them and their audiences likely will be presented with many of the dilemmas described in detail above. They must determine whether saving public-interest journalism also fuels its resemblance to corporate messaging, who is interested in and responsible for keeping these separate, and how that can be done—be it through alternative financing models (see Briggs, 2012; Franklin, 2014; Anderson et al., 2016), greater transparency measures, or media literacy programs. These questions look very much like those journalism scholars have confronted for years. Yet fresh 58 nuances require reexaminations of past assumptions, as Coddington (2015) demonstrates with his critique of those who would stand on ceremony:

The erosion of this boundary is not necessarily something to be mourned. For decades, it has provided a means for journalists to avoid knowledge of a moral responsibility for the creeping co-optation of their work by commercial interests. It has also left them ill prepared for an online-oriented media environment in which their work is increasingly vulnerable to the fluctuations of market forces. (p. 79) Changing business models in the news media require the sustained attention of practitioners and scholars alike. The evolving production landscape for editorial and sponsored content raises new questions about journalistic boundaries, professional identities and rituals, and organization-work relationships. Adding to the existing scholarship of Coddington, Cohen and Meyers, among others, this report employed a mixed methodology to advance the journalism, advertising and media studies literature on occupational values, labor practices and industry configurations surrounding the production of editorial and sponsored content. Findings from a series of qualitative interviews with practitioners, as well as discourse analysis of Contently and its freelancer network, reveal responsibility for maintaining news-business divides and transparency in an age of freelance-produced sponsored content is increasingly individualized. Much of this burden for negotiating between public-interest reporting and financially motivated messaging is placed on the shoulders of hybrid journalist-marketers. In contributing to practitioners’ and academic observers’ conceptualizations of this space, my report considers how a series of new actors, with diverging affiliations to news and advertising, also have inserted themselves into, or repositioned themselves within, industry conversations now defining conditions and directions. For scholars studying sponsored content and how it is practiced alongside performances of journalistic affiliations, there are plentiful and peripatetic divisions 59 among stakeholders in this emerging form. These require further attention, and more inclusive research that allows for greater representation, to better comprehend their intricacies and potential repercussions. Future studies of sponsored content that clarify audience agency as it pertains to branded content—through the lenses of executives, middle managers, atypically employed laborers and readers themselves—are imperative. So too are works that consider freelancer practices and access to resources vis-à-vis their demographic characteristics and professional affiliation. Additional and comparative studies focused specifically on contractor subgroups—as well as other gatekeepers and intermediaries between practitioners, publishers and their publics—therefore are advised. For publishers and content creators, redoubled efforts to define professional and organizational guidelines around content production are needed. At stake is not only their livelihood but also the very nature of their societal role.

60 References

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