>This is a cautionary tale. Anyone writing for any publisher in today’s commercial market, where the managed advertorial and native ad seems to be the only way to make money, needs to be cautious. More importantly today’s readers need to be a little more than cautious when believing anything. Native advertising is a most insidious concept and should be rejected by every publisher. Instead it is welcomed by the broadcasting networks and most of the major newspapers including the New York Times. Are the writers saying nice things or are they paid to say nice things?
I think we quickly need changes in the way we handle native advertising. It is hugely problematic and basically predatory.
I believe that there are ways to genuinely advertise if the advertisement is openly disclosed and the ad is informative, but native advertising is essentially just a sophisticated and insidious form of manipulation. It turns readers into non-consenting consumers and the purpose of journalism from informing truthfully to a sales pitch. I have trouble imagining that many people think this is tolerable if we'd be debating it openly and brought it to the forefront of the news (which ironically is not going to happen).
"The power of advertisers over television programming stems from the simple fact that they buy and pay for the programs-they are the "patrons" who provide the media subsidy. As such, the media compete for their patronage, developing specialized staff to solicit advertisers and necessarily having to explain how their programs serve advertisers’ needs. The choices of these patrons greatly affect the welfare of the media, and the patrons become what William Evan calls "normative reference organizations," whose requirements and demands the media must accommodate if they are to succeed." - Noam Chomsky , Manufacture of Consent.
This makes me think that, besides the fact that Elon Musk seems to constantly has his foot in his mouth nowadays, this may be partly why Tesla has been getting so much negative press coverage (particularly headlines, which are usually written by editors, not the journalists who seem more objective to me). Tesla doesn't advertise. Everyone else in the industry does, bankrolling the press.
I know the press will deny this motive, but how can it not be a factor, even slightly?
This sort of problem became more or less inevitable once people stopped paying for content.
With a traditional newspaper your readers are footing at least part of the bill for the articles, so you are beholden to them to keep them informed. At least in theory. These days however the only payment is coming from advertisers, so they are the only ones you need to keep happy.
This is the same problem that TV and Radio news has always had, and why they were considered inferior to newspapers for factual reporting. Of course there are a few outlets that are listener/viewer funded, and they tend to be more highly regarded than their counterparts. Outlets like the BBC, NPR, and PBS.
Theoretically cable news shouldn't have this problem since part of the cost comes from people's cable bills, but other forces have conspired to poison that well.
With a traditional newspaper your readers are footing at least part of the bill for the articles
When was that exactly?
Back when I used to pay for a physical newspaper thrown at my door, I remember it often said that the price covered printing and delivery and most of the newspaper's income came from advertising. Was this wrong? It doesn't seem like it... it was sub $1 per issue, which seems about an order of magnitude less than what Amazon would charge.
For those who are not familiar with them term "native advertising", it means integrating the ad into the page content in such a way that it doesn't appear to be an ad at first glance.
In other words, using the same style as the adjacent content, and removing any boxes or rules that separate an ad.
It's pretty far down the slope into dishonesty territory w.r.t. separating content from editorial or advertising, and the FTC should investigate and regulate native ads.
Native ads should be clearly labeled and disclosed, as with any other ads. This isn’t controversial and is what all serious journalism organizations are already doing.
I don’t buy that the format is inherently any more dangerous than anything else. All ads need to be respectful of the reader regardless of form.
Ads are always disrespectful of their victims. They are intrusive and manipulative by nature.
Self respecting marketers will often say that their goal is to inform, but without fail, that "information" is laced and inextricably woven with manipulative psychology, tangential to the product being sold.
Further, in any industry where it can be employed, it chokes out every other form of revenue. How can anyone compete with "free"? Then, inevitably, when ads enter a space, they quickly dominate and poison it.
I have a more radical approach to that : I discard any opinion I see in a press article (that is, most of it, usually), and only focus on new facts the article brings.
I don't mean any disrespect for journalists and I'm deeply thankful for their work (I even considered becoming one, as a kid), but I don't care for their opinion. I did once, before the internet, because opinions were valuable, as the only ones you were exposed to were family's and friends'.
But today, the internet is a massive opinion building/sharing machine. The last thing we need is the press to do it as well, instead it must be the place where we can expect to find facts and fact checking. I don't have any problem with random people sharing their opinion either - it's cool we can do it - but now I expect more from the press.
Now, I'm well aware solving the native ad problem does not solve the real problem : press has hard time keeping afloat. My usual suggestion about that is for browsers to include means for micro-payment (be it using google pay, cryptocurrencies, apple pay, whatever pay, a new standard, I don't care). The main problem with paywalls to me is that they expect users to subscribe for monthly subscriptions, renewed until they're manually cancelled. This is not how people consume news anymore. They come to an article because of its content, they wish to see that content, they don't want to see other articles. We need to allow people to quickly pay a small fee to see a single article, without all the hassle of using a credit card.
I don’t think there’s any change needed. Why prop up the status quo with bureaucracy? Mainstream media was shedding eyes and under scrutiny well before “fake news”.
Let MSM die its slow death while new and better services make their debut.
Mainstream media had what was called the “Chinese wall” between the ad business and the newsroom. For a sales guy to even speak with an editor would be highly inappropriate. It wasn’t perfect, but exceptions would have at least violated social and professional norms with rank and file journalism school graduates. Alternative media (like what the corpses of the old mainstream press have become) don’t even pretend to have that sort of discipline. Their funding model is to promote an individual, business, or political agenda, straight up. On this one, I mourn the loss of the traditional press.
Am I missing something? He says PC Magazine fired him because he was critical of his 5G article and that rankled the magazine's sponsors. Who specifically are the sponsors he's thinking of? Is there any evidence whatsoever that this is what happened?
So they linked his article about 5G to a different one. Why does that mean he was fired for writing the article? I feel like an application of Hanlon's Razor (not quite right, but I don't know of someone else's who fits the situation better) is called for. Is it more likely the editors thought his article sucked and used their editorial discretion to redirect his 5G article to a different one or that there was a conspiracy between his advertisers and the magazine's management to fire a guy who's been wrong on just about everything for the last 30 years because he hit the nail too close to the head?
Having run a newspaper, I can confirm that advertisers do contact management and say "I didn't like that article, do something about it or we won't be advertising with you again". And the financial pressure is intense. You have many, many staff to pay, and the commercial pressure to keep advertisers happy is real and difficult to manage.
I can totally believe that the magazine caved in to pressure from an advertiser to sack a journalist and pull a story. It happens every day. Luckily I never had to do it, but there were times I was very tempted.
I totally agree with his comment that the only way journalism is going to survive is if readers start paying for it. What we have now is mostly not-journalism.
> I can totally believe that the magazine caved in to pressure from an advertiser to sack a journalist and pull a story.
As an example of where it has happened:
> Gerstmann revealed that his firing was in fact related to the low review score he had given to Kane & Lynch, though his explanation cited other similar events that led up to the termination, including a 7.5 (good) rating given to Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction by Aaron Thomas, then an employee under Gerstmann. Events such as these led to him being "called into a room" several times to discuss reviews posted on the site. Gerstmann went on to lay the blame on a new management team that was unable to properly handle tension between the marketing and editorial staff, laying additional blame on the marketing department, which he claimed was unprepared in how to handle publisher complaints and threats to withdraw advertising money over low review scores.
I don’t deny at all that it happens, and I understand that management has a difficult path to tread, but he just threw out a claim that it had happened to him with absolutely no evidence or even plausible story of who did it or why.
A person who's been writing the same type of inflammatory articles for 30 years is suddenly fired, while an article he wrote recently blasting 5G is completely replaced by a new article favorable to 5G... I think you're using Hanlan's Razor to cut in the wrong direction this time.
It's entirely possible that this not very good column was some sort of final straw and there's some history we don't know leading up to it. The story as told still seems very odd but, of course, we're only hearing one side of it.
Not that I read the article that was removed, but in this he said he wasn't even that critical himself, just pointing towards all the other critical articles and noting they need to fix whatever is causing them to be written.
That said, column seems more than a bit sensationalistic and one-sided --but not really all that different from many things that Dvorak has written over the years.
There is an impressive-looking group of credentials behind a petition[1] to halt 5G rollouts in the EU until more research can be done. The science just isn't settled yet, partly because doing a rigorous controlled trial in real world conditions is just about impossible.
Keep in mind it's not just about cancer, it's any health effect of any kind. The nature of the shorter wavelengths of 5G means that more transmit power and/or more transmitters to cover the same area will be required, so we can't necessarily take what we know about the current bands and assume these are equally safe. Too many confounding factors.
There's an excellent writeup from Vox on the state of the science. It's a mess, to put it lightly. [2]
<I'm not saying this because the technology does not work. It's a bad bet because so little is known about the effects of millimeter waves (30GHz-300GHz). While these frequencies only permeate a small fraction of the human epidermis (the skin), the effect on the cornea, in particular, needs serious research.
Because the industry is too cheap to study the health effects of the technology itself, it lets this sort of product out the door despite the fact that it has already been weaponized by the military
Aren't the frequencies regulated by the FCC? Why should industry bear the burden of proving something safe that the government has already approved? It's not the world I like, but it's the one we're in.
Edit: just realized I missed where the quote ended. My question remains, though I suppose patent isn't really who I meant to ask.
CMS problems aren't exactly uncommon. But he was apparently fired and, absent a big backstory of which people are unaware, it's bizarre at the least to fire someone with such a long tenure without any explanation. Regardless of the sorry state of so many long-established tech pubs.
Thanks for this! The in.pcmag.com link to Indian PC Mag shows a very suspicious 403 error now (not even a 404). But yours works. It's fascinating, two pcmag.com links back to back somehow confuses the CMS's router and shows the old article. Nice one.
He raises many good points about the potential downsides of 5G. US telecom corporations are rushing to beat China Telecom companies & South Korean companies to the punch. The US is definitely not going to have the same dominance in 5G that they had with 4G, especially if they take hazardous paths to a nationwide rollout
There are no US based mobile infrastructure companies competing for 4G or 5G installations. Qualcomm is lower level supplier providing components and competing with MediaTek, Samsung and Chinese.
There is only 5 major players left: Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE and Samsung. Two Chinese, Finnish, Swedish and South Korean.
I don't know based on what you are saying that, but all US cellular operators already told shareholders their billion dollar plans for 5G as far as last year.
I don't know what was the cause of him getting fired, but he certainly SHOULD be fired for such a sleazy sensationalist piece:
> When you do a search for "5G is Safe" on Google and Bing, you get a number of negative stories and a laundry list of why some people believe it's unsafe. Companies may as well begin to market a 5G mobile phone with a skull and crossbones on it.
Really, the entirety of his journalistic research is a Google search that somehow justifies him to reproduce conspiracy theories as facts? Technology similar to 5G "has been already weaponized"? Good riddance.
As I read it he's saying "the safety of millimeter waves needs more research" which isn't unreasonable. wifi doesn't use millimeter waves - the safety of wifi's frequency range is very well researched and has been for a long time.
Dvorak is a troll. I could go show the reasons, but he's all about saying inflammatory things (mostly at apple fans) and getting them to buy magazines / click things. This is a continuation in that trend, but may or may not be true.
Dvorak has been known to troll but when you write a typical Dvorak-tier skeptical piece on 5G then new management fires you and suddenly your 5G-skeptical piece has been replaced by a pro-5G piece, I don't see how you can reach any conclusion other than the same one he did in this post. Did you even read the post?
I guess to be eat my comment was intended as a "good riddance" regardless of the truth of his firing. Clearly with you I failed to deliver that message, so sorry about that.
I did post about this in the other thread and folks piled on calling me a conspiracy theorist, but in the letter JCD received from his editor, they said they were shutting down all outside columns.
This is in fact not true -- other columns have continued since then and some other columnists have had the title listed in their author bios changed while continuing to have articles published.
In my personal experience though, ending these sorts of outside contracts with a half-truth in the vein of "the organization has decided to make a change" isn't remotely unusual. It's entirely possible that PC Mag decided to prune their outside contributors to a core group and perhaps change their relationship somewhat with the remaining ones.
Is it disingenuous, especially with someone who has been working for you in some form for a very long time? Sure. But I've seen a number of online pubs that go through changes with their outside contributors and communication is mostly pretty poor.
Readit News
I think we quickly need changes in the way we handle native advertising. It is hugely problematic and basically predatory.
I believe that there are ways to genuinely advertise if the advertisement is openly disclosed and the ad is informative, but native advertising is essentially just a sophisticated and insidious form of manipulation. It turns readers into non-consenting consumers and the purpose of journalism from informing truthfully to a sales pitch. I have trouble imagining that many people think this is tolerable if we'd be debating it openly and brought it to the forefront of the news (which ironically is not going to happen).
I know the press will deny this motive, but how can it not be a factor, even slightly?
"Manufacture of consent" is the Walter Lippman term they named the book after.
Deleted Comment
With a traditional newspaper your readers are footing at least part of the bill for the articles, so you are beholden to them to keep them informed. At least in theory. These days however the only payment is coming from advertisers, so they are the only ones you need to keep happy.
This is the same problem that TV and Radio news has always had, and why they were considered inferior to newspapers for factual reporting. Of course there are a few outlets that are listener/viewer funded, and they tend to be more highly regarded than their counterparts. Outlets like the BBC, NPR, and PBS.
Theoretically cable news shouldn't have this problem since part of the cost comes from people's cable bills, but other forces have conspired to poison that well.
When was that exactly?
Back when I used to pay for a physical newspaper thrown at my door, I remember it often said that the price covered printing and delivery and most of the newspaper's income came from advertising. Was this wrong? It doesn't seem like it... it was sub $1 per issue, which seems about an order of magnitude less than what Amazon would charge.
In other words, using the same style as the adjacent content, and removing any boxes or rules that separate an ad.
It's pretty far down the slope into dishonesty territory w.r.t. separating content from editorial or advertising, and the FTC should investigate and regulate native ads.
I don’t buy that the format is inherently any more dangerous than anything else. All ads need to be respectful of the reader regardless of form.
Self respecting marketers will often say that their goal is to inform, but without fail, that "information" is laced and inextricably woven with manipulative psychology, tangential to the product being sold.
Further, in any industry where it can be employed, it chokes out every other form of revenue. How can anyone compete with "free"? Then, inevitably, when ads enter a space, they quickly dominate and poison it.
I don't mean any disrespect for journalists and I'm deeply thankful for their work (I even considered becoming one, as a kid), but I don't care for their opinion. I did once, before the internet, because opinions were valuable, as the only ones you were exposed to were family's and friends'.
But today, the internet is a massive opinion building/sharing machine. The last thing we need is the press to do it as well, instead it must be the place where we can expect to find facts and fact checking. I don't have any problem with random people sharing their opinion either - it's cool we can do it - but now I expect more from the press.
Now, I'm well aware solving the native ad problem does not solve the real problem : press has hard time keeping afloat. My usual suggestion about that is for browsers to include means for micro-payment (be it using google pay, cryptocurrencies, apple pay, whatever pay, a new standard, I don't care). The main problem with paywalls to me is that they expect users to subscribe for monthly subscriptions, renewed until they're manually cancelled. This is not how people consume news anymore. They come to an article because of its content, they wish to see that content, they don't want to see other articles. We need to allow people to quickly pay a small fee to see a single article, without all the hassle of using a credit card.
Let MSM die its slow death while new and better services make their debut.
> Mainstream media was shedding eyes
News has been “shedding” paid subscribers. Shedding eyes? Citation needed.
> and under scrutiny
By who?
So they linked his article about 5G to a different one. Why does that mean he was fired for writing the article? I feel like an application of Hanlon's Razor (not quite right, but I don't know of someone else's who fits the situation better) is called for. Is it more likely the editors thought his article sucked and used their editorial discretion to redirect his 5G article to a different one or that there was a conspiracy between his advertisers and the magazine's management to fire a guy who's been wrong on just about everything for the last 30 years because he hit the nail too close to the head?
I don't buy it.
I can totally believe that the magazine caved in to pressure from an advertiser to sack a journalist and pull a story. It happens every day. Luckily I never had to do it, but there were times I was very tempted.
I totally agree with his comment that the only way journalism is going to survive is if readers start paying for it. What we have now is mostly not-journalism.
As an example of where it has happened:
> Gerstmann revealed that his firing was in fact related to the low review score he had given to Kane & Lynch, though his explanation cited other similar events that led up to the termination, including a 7.5 (good) rating given to Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction by Aaron Thomas, then an employee under Gerstmann. Events such as these led to him being "called into a room" several times to discuss reviews posted on the site. Gerstmann went on to lay the blame on a new management team that was unable to properly handle tension between the marketing and editorial staff, laying additional blame on the marketing department, which he claimed was unprepared in how to handle publisher complaints and threats to withdraw advertising money over low review scores.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Gerstmann
That said, column seems more than a bit sensationalistic and one-sided --but not really all that different from many things that Dvorak has written over the years.
Dvorak's writing has always been about being contrarian and kicking up controversy.
https://patch.com/california/millvalley/mill-valley-parents-...
The claims simply don't make sense. Non-ionizing EM radiation has absolutely no documented effects on humans.
There is an impressive-looking group of credentials behind a petition[1] to halt 5G rollouts in the EU until more research can be done. The science just isn't settled yet, partly because doing a rigorous controlled trial in real world conditions is just about impossible.
Keep in mind it's not just about cancer, it's any health effect of any kind. The nature of the shorter wavelengths of 5G means that more transmit power and/or more transmitters to cover the same area will be required, so we can't necessarily take what we know about the current bands and assume these are equally safe. Too many confounding factors.
There's an excellent writeup from Vox on the state of the science. It's a mess, to put it lightly. [2]
[1]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B14R6QNkmaXuelFrNWRQcThNV0U...
[2]: https://www.vox.com/2018/7/16/17067214/cellphone-cancer-5g-e...
Then the dreaded "403 Not allowed".
Archived here: http://web.archive.org/web/20180913212959/https://in.pcmag.c...
Here's the critical bit...
<I'm not saying this because the technology does not work. It's a bad bet because so little is known about the effects of millimeter waves (30GHz-300GHz). While these frequencies only permeate a small fraction of the human epidermis (the skin), the effect on the cornea, in particular, needs serious research.
Because the industry is too cheap to study the health effects of the technology itself, it lets this sort of product out the door despite the fact that it has already been weaponized by the military
http://web.archive.org/web/20180930061356/https://jnlwp.defe...
These frequencies are so poor at travelling long distances, they need a transmitter on nearly every telephone pole and light pole to make 5G work.>
Edit: just realized I missed where the quote ended. My question remains, though I suppose patent isn't really who I meant to ask.
https://www.pcmag.com/article/345387/what-is-5gpcmag.com/com...
https://www.pcmag.com/article/345387/what-is-5gpcmag.com/com...
CMS problems aren't exactly uncommon. But he was apparently fired and, absent a big backstory of which people are unaware, it's bizarre at the least to fire someone with such a long tenure without any explanation. Regardless of the sorry state of so many long-established tech pubs.
Thanks for this! The in.pcmag.com link to Indian PC Mag shows a very suspicious 403 error now (not even a 404). But yours works. It's fascinating, two pcmag.com links back to back somehow confuses the CMS's router and shows the old article. Nice one.
Since this'll probably be "fixed", I fed the URL to archive.is: http://archive.is/KbsW8
[Also, for posterity, the view of the 403: http://archive.is/ggMat - thanks to whoever added this]
There are no US based mobile infrastructure companies competing for 4G or 5G installations. Qualcomm is lower level supplier providing components and competing with MediaTek, Samsung and Chinese.
There is only 5 major players left: Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE and Samsung. Two Chinese, Finnish, Swedish and South Korean.
> When you do a search for "5G is Safe" on Google and Bing, you get a number of negative stories and a laundry list of why some people believe it's unsafe. Companies may as well begin to market a 5G mobile phone with a skull and crossbones on it.
Really, the entirety of his journalistic research is a Google search that somehow justifies him to reproduce conspiracy theories as facts? Technology similar to 5G "has been already weaponized"? Good riddance.
This is in fact not true -- other columns have continued since then and some other columnists have had the title listed in their author bios changed while continuing to have articles published.
Is it disingenuous, especially with someone who has been working for you in some form for a very long time? Sure. But I've seen a number of online pubs that go through changes with their outside contributors and communication is mostly pretty poor.