| Here is what I think he might be getting at: Advertisement is not a very effective form of marcomm because people tune it out, and if they don't, they don't believe what the ads say anyway. PR is much more effective. Part of the reason is that if you can make your piece look like a regular article, that in itself makes it more believable. But the other part is that sometimes PR pieces are genuinely useful for the recipient. If I were in the market for a new x, I think I'd want to read the reviews of xs, even if some of them are paid for by manufacturers of xs. Fake Steve often makes fun of the Apple "flaks" and the "hacks" that print the "flaks"s output, but I think many people in the market for Apple products actually like reading the gushing stories about Apple. If PR is the new advertising, then an obvious way to fix the newspapers is to make the relationship with PR companies explicit and charge for it. It's not deceptive if the readers want it and you don't try to hide what you are doing. Charging to make product reviews is one possibility. Offering to write stories about any topic for payment is another, which would make you a direct competitor to PR companies. There is a balance between making high-quality, independent content and making for-pay content that must be carefully managed, but this is not really all that different from today's print media that range from all-ads newspapers with minimal and very crappy journalistic content, to media with high quality journalistic content and almost no ads. A company doing this should probably never offer a positive review for cash, and never offer a positive spin on a topic. Only ever offer a review or a story, with payment due regardless of whether the customer likes it or not. In the end, this would be in the interest of the customers anyway, even though they might not believe that at first. |