by Ryan Holiday
*Somebody once joked that I should name my small ranch in Texas “The Content Farm” because that’s what paid for it.
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TACTIC #2
TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT TO HEAR
Even though credibility is all you have to sell, it’s not enough anymore. Credibility is not working as a business model. Credibility of journalism is at an all-time low, anyway.
—KELLY MCBRIDE, POYNTER INSTITUTE
THE PROBLEM OF JOURNALISM, SAYS EDWARD JAY Epstein in his book Between Fact and Fiction, is simple. Journalists are rarely in a position to establish the truth of an issue themselves, since they didn’t witness it personally. They are “entirely dependent on self-interested ‘sources’ ” to supply their facts. Every part of the news-making process is defined by this relationship; everything is colored by this reality.
Who are these self-interested sources? Well, anyone selling a product, a message, or an agenda. People like me.
When the New York Times publishes leaked documents, there is an implicit understanding that they have at least attempted to verify their validity. The same goes for the identity of the source who gave it to them. Online, “anonymous” means something else entirely. Quotes and tips are drawn from unsolicited, untraced e-mails or angry comments pulled from comments sections, or sent in by people who have something to gain from it. I know, because I have been this kind of source dozens of times, and it was never for anything important. My identity is never verified.
Today, the online-driven news cycle is going a million miles a minute in a million directions. The New York Times may still try to verify their sources, but it hardly matters, because no one else does. This creates endless opportunities for people like me to slip in and twist things to my liking. As Epstein said, the discrepancy between what actually happened and the version of what happened provided by sources is an enormous gray area. Of all such areas, it’s where I have the most fun and direct influence.
THE DELIBERATE LEAK
Once during a lawsuit I needed to get some information into the public discussion of it, so I dashed off a fake internal memo explaining the company’s position, printed it out, scanned it, and sent the file to a bunch of blogs as if I were an employee leaking a “memo we just got from our boss.” The same bloggers who were uninterested in the facts when I informed them directly gladly put up exclusive! and leaked! posts about it. They could tell my side of the story because I told it to them in words they wanted to hear. More people saw it than ever would have had I issued an “official statement.”
I once had a client who had been subjected to a complete hit job of a piece by a major newspaper. The writer of the article had actually been running their own hater blog about the company they then “objectively” reported on. When the client complained to the writ-er’s editor, the editor shrugged it off. To reply, I simply had the client write a long e-mail to his staff explaining what happened and laying out the complete (and embarrassing) case against the article. Then we forwarded that e-mail to a media reporter at a different outlet, who published it in full. The e-mail read well and was quite damning—because it had been written for the express purpose of being made public. The original outlet had no choice but to respond and will hopefully think twice about a hatchet job like that in the future.
Another time I had some promotional images for a Halloween campaign I also couldn’t use, because of copyright concerns. I still wanted them seen, so I had one of my employees e-mail them to Jezebel and Gawker and write, “I shouldn’t be doing this but I found some secret images on the American Apparel server and here they are.” The post based on this lie did ninety thousand views. The writer wrote back a helpful tip: No need to leak me info from your company e-mail address; you might get caught. I thought, But how else could she be sure they were real?
It was funny at the time. Then a few months later, a U.S. congressman allegedly exchanged e-mails with a girl on craigslist and sent her a shirtless photo of himself. The girl forwarded this photo and the incriminating e-mail correspondence that supposedly occurred along with it to Gawker (which owns Jezebel). Gawker posted it, and the congressman immediately resigned.
Knowing now that an anonymous tip to Gawker had the power to end the career of a U.S. congressman took a little of the fun out of it for me. Scratch that—now my personal knowledge of how sourcing works online genuinely scares me.*
PRESS RELEASE 2.0
When I first started in PR, all of the leading web gurus were proclaiming the death of the press release. Good riddance, I thought. Journalists should care too much about what they write to churn out articles and posts based on press releases.
I could not have been more wrong. Before long I came to see the truth: Blogs love press releases. It does every part of their job for them: The material is already written; the angle laid out; the subject newsworthy; and, since it comes from an official newswire, they can blame someone else if the story turns out to be wrong.
As a 2010 study by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found:
As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.1 [emphasis mine]
So I started putting out press releases all the time. Open a new store? Put out a press release. Launch a new product? Put out a press release. Launch a new color of a new product? Press release. A blogger might pick it up. And even if no outlets do, press releases through services like PRWeb are deliberately search-engine optimized to show up well in Google results indefinitely. Most important, investing sites like Google Finance, CNN Money, Yahoo! Finance, and Motley Fool all automatically syndicate the major release wires. If you’re a public company with a stock symbol, the good news in any release you put out shows up right in front of your most important audience: stockholders. Minutes after you put it out, it’s right there on the company’s stock page in the “Recent News” section, eagerly being read by investors and traders.
I quickly learned that not everyone saw this as harmless, low-hanging media fruit. My instinct is not illegal profit, but for those who have it, blogs’ blind faith in press releases presents opportunities. It did for New York stockbroker Lambros Ballas: He was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for issuing fake online press releases about the stocks of companies like Google, Disney, and Microsoft and seeding them on blogs and finance forums. On the fake news of an acquisition offer from Microsoft, shares of Local.com jumped 75 percent in one day, after which he and other traders dumped all their shares and moved on to pumping other stocks on fake news.2 In Austin a man named Christopher French was fined forty thousand dollars by the SEC for pumping up stocks via articles on SeekingAlpha.com under fake names. The fake names weren’t the problem. The problem was that he was paid at least sixteen thousand dollars by the companies to write those articles. When I later saw reports of a man who planned to set off explosive devices at Target so he could buy their stock at a discount and profit from the eventual rebound, I thought: Man, somebody should have told this guy there is a much, much easier way to do that.
It’s stunning how much news is now driven by such releases—reputable or otherwise. A LexisNexis search of major newspapers for the words “in a press release” brings back so many results that the service actually attempts to warn you against trying, saying, “This search has been interrupted because it will return more than 3,000 results. If you continue with this search it may take some time to return this information.” Same goes for the phrases “announced today” and “told reporters.” In other words, newspapers depended on marketing spam literally too many times to count in the last year.
A Google blog search for “said in a press release” (meaning they quoted directly from a release) brings back 307,000 results for the same period as the LexisNexis search, and more than 4 million for all time. “Announced tod
ay” brings up more than 32,000 articles for a single week. If you get specific, an internal search of TechCrunch brings up more than 5,000 articles using “announced today” and 7,000 attributed citations to press releases. This pales in comparison to the Huffington Post, whose bloggers have written the words “announced today” more than 50,000 times and cited press releases more than 200,000 times. And, of course, there is also talking-pointsmemo.com, whose name unintentionally reveals what most blogs and newspapers carelessly pass on to their readers: prewritten talking points from the powers that be.
Anyone can now be that power. Anyone can give blogs their talking points. To call it a seller’s market is an understatement. But it’s the only thing I can think of that comes close to describing a medium in which dominant personalities like tech blogger Robert Scoble can nostalgically repost things on his Google+ account like the “original pitch” for publicity that the iPad start-up Flipboard had sent him. It’s a great time to be a media manipulator when your marks actually love receiving PR pitches.
NOT EVEN NEEDING TO BE THE SOURCE
Bloggers are under incredible pressure to produce, leaving little time for research or verification, let alone for speaking to sources. In some cases, the story they are chasing is so crazy that they don’t want to risk doing research, because the whole facade would collapse.
In my experience, bloggers operate by some general rules of thumb: If a source can’t be contacted by e-mail, they probably can’t be a source. I’ve talked to bloggers on the phone only a few times, ever—but thousands of times over e-mail. If background information isn’t publicly or easily available, it probably can’t be included. Writers are at the mercy of official sources, such as press releases, spokesmen, government officials, and media kits. And these are for the instances when they even bother to check anything.
Most important, they’re at the mercy of Wikipedia, because that’s where they do their research. Too bad people like me manipulate that too. Nothing illustrates this better than the story of a man who, as a joke, changed the name of comedian and actor Russell Brand’s mother on Wikipedia from Barbara to Juliet. When Brand took his mother as his date to the Academy Awards shortly after, the Los Angeles Times ran the online headline over their picture: RUSSELL BRAND AND HIS MOTHER JULIET BRAND. . .
I remember sitting on the couch at Tucker Max’s house one January when something occurred to me about his then on-and-off-again bestseller. “Hey, Tucker, did you notice your book made the New York Times list in 2006, 2007, and 2008?” (Meaning the book had appeared on the list at least once in all three years, but not continuously.) So I typed it up, sourced it, and added it to Wikipedia, delineating each year.* Not long after I posted it, a journalist cribbed my “research” and did us the big favor of having poor reading comprehension. He wrote: “Tucker Max’s book has spent over 3 years on the New York Times Bestseller List.” Then we took this and doubled up our citation on Wikipedia to use this new, more generous interpretation.
This is a cycle I have watched speed up but also descend into outright plagiarism. I can’t divulge the specifics, but I commonly see uniquely worded or selectively edited facts that paid editors inserted into Wikipedia show up later in major newspapers and blogs with the exact same wording (you’ll have to trust me on when and where).
Wikipedia acts as a certifier of basic information for many people, including reporters. Even a subtle influence over the way that Wikipedia frames an issue—such as criminal charges, a controversial campaign, a lawsuit, or even a critical reception—can have a major impact on the way bloggers write about it. It is the difference between “So-and-so released their second album in 2011” and “So-and-so’s first album was followed by the multiplatinum and critically lauded hit . . .” You change the descriptors on Wikipedia, and reporters and readers change their descriptors down the road.
A complete overhaul of one high-profile starlet’s Wikipedia page was once followed less than a week later by a six-page spread in a big tabloid that so obviously used our positive and flattering language from Wikipedia that I was almost scared it would be its own scandal.
It’s why you have to control your page. Otherwise you risk putting yourself in the awkward position a friend found himself in when profiled by a reporter at a national newspaper, who asked: “So, according to Wikipedia you’re a failed screenwriter. Is that true?”
TRUST ME, I’M AN EXPERT
It’s not a stretch to convince anyone that it’s easy to become a source for blogs. Cracking the mainstream media is much harder, right? Nope. There’s actually a tool designed expressly for this purpose.
As I mentioned in the preface, there is a site called HARO (Help a Reporter Out), founded by PR man Peter Shankman, that connects hundreds of “self-interested sources” to willing reporters every day. It is the de facto sourcing and lead factory for journalists and publicists. According to the site, nearly thirty thousand members of the media have used HARO sources, including the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Huffington Post, and everyone in between.
What do these experts get out of offering their services? Free publicity, of course. In fact, “Free Publicity” is HARO’s tagline. I’ve used it myself to con reporters from ABC News to Reuters to The Today Show, and yes, even the vaunted New York Times. Sometimes I don’t even do it myself. I just have an assistant pretend to be me over e-mail or on the phone.
The fact that my eyes light up when I think of how to use HARO’s services to benefit myself and my clients should be illustrative. If I was tasked with building someone’s reputation as an “industry expert,” it would take nothing but a few fake e-mail addresses and speedy responses to the right bloggers to manufacture the impression. I’d start with using HARO to get quoted on a blog that didn’t care much about credentials, then use that piece as a marker of authority to justify inclusion in a more reputable publication. It wouldn’t take long to be a “nationally recognized expert who has been featured in _______, ________, and ______.” The only problem is that it wouldn’t be real.
Journalists say HARO is a research tool, but it isn’t. It is a tool that manufactures self-promotion to look like research. Consider alerts like
URGENT: [E-mail redacted]@aol.com needs NEW and LITTLE known resources (apps, Websites, etc.) that offer families unique ways to save money.*
This is not a noble effort by a reporter to be educated but an all too common example of a lazy blogger giving a marketer an opportunity to insert themselves into their story. Journalists also love to put out bulletins asking for sources to support stories they are already writing.
[E-mail redacted]@gmail.com needs horror story relating to mortgages, student loans, credit reports, debt collectors, or credit cards.
URGENT: [E-mail redacted]@abc.com is looking for a man who took on a new role around the house after losing his job.
There you have it—how your bogus trend-story sausage is made. In fact, I even saw one HARO request by a reporter hoping “to speak with an expert about how fads are created.” I hope whoever answered it explained that masturbatory media coverage from people like her has a lot to do with it.
While HARO essentially encourages journalists to look for sources who simply confirm what they were already intending to say, the practice spreads far beyond that singularly bad platform. Instead of researching a topic and communicating their findings to the public, journalists from all sorts of outlets simply grab obligatory—but artificial—quotes from “experts” to validate their pageview journalism. To the readers it appears as legitimate news. To the journalist, they were just reverse engineering their story from a search engine-friendly premise.
An example: In 2015 the New York Times published a story on vaping. The reporter found her sources, apparently, by sending out the following tweet:
If you’re a teen that vapes and want to talk to a reporter twice your age about why you love it contact @[email protected]
One of the responders quoted in that popu
lar trend piece later claimed he made up all his answers, including his name! To prove that there is no such thing as irony, the hoaxer admitted all this to Gawker, who just a few days later would post their own trolling “tell us what we want to hear” call for sources in order to write a piece about BuzzFeed. Even worse was the BBC reporter who tweeted that they were looking for someone to comment on Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance. Someone replied recommending that the reporter speak with a fan and tagged someone who might work, but the reporter responded by revealing their true intentions, “I don’t want a real fan—just someone who can say it was inappropriate that her performance was political.”
Far too many stories are created with this deliberately manipulative mind-set. Marketing shills masquerade as legitimate experts, giving advice and commenting on issues in ways that benefit their clients and trick people into buying their products. I constantly receive e-mails from bloggers and journalists asking me to provide “a response” to some absurd rumor or speculative analysis. They just need a quote from me denying the rumor (which most people will skip over) to justify publishing it. The agenda has already been set, and the reader is being set up to be fooled.
THE HIT JOB
A few years ago, I got tired of a speed trap camera near my house and decided to do something about it. Now, I could have gone to a public hearing, voiced my objections to these cameras, and hoped that someone in the media might report on it. But that would have left too much up to chance. Instead, I e-mailed a reporter at the Times-Picayune—the struggling but influential daily newspaper in New Orleans—who I knew had covered this beat before. I explained to him that I was a new resident to the city who had gotten dozens of unfair tickets (including three in one day). I emphasized what an undue financial burden such tickets had been on my girlfriend when she had gotten some herself and how she’d been reduced to tears by a rude city employee when she protested. I sent in a picture of a busted sign near the camera. I played the victim, saying that I felt shaken down, as if a bully had taken my lunch money.