The Marketing of News
It’s Time to Bridge the Awareness Gap
At long last, it appears the news media has moved on from those marketing campaigns that pleaded with the public to trust it.
Were they well-done, often inspiring campaigns that unabashedly reminded us that a free press is vital to democracy? Yes, they were. Were they meaningless in the eyes of the public? Why, yes, they were. Why? Anytime an individual or an institution demands to be trusted, the kneejerk reaction is not to trust them. Parents of teenagers know what I mean.
Now, we’re in a new era: ‘fact-based journalism’ marketing, where the focus is on delivering news based on verified facts.
Did you think journalism needed to be fact-based in order to be called journalism? Not these days. Somewhere over the course of modern times, journalism split into fragments. Then the fragments fragmented, and all semblance of what people think of when they hear the term “journalism” was lost. Now we have agenda-driven (“We tell you very little and you like us because we don’t ask you to think”) journalism, opinion-driven (“We only use the facts we need to prove our point”) journalism, and anti-mainstream (“We fight the bias of mainstream news by independently producing biased news of our own”) journalism.
