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When taxpayers buy publicity Saturday, Jun 28, 2008 By John Brummett This is too rich. It's about blurring news and advertising in the news media. It's also about the liberality with which those in government spend your money for their own aggrandizement. There's this publication in Little Rock called Soiree. Basically it takes photographs of Little Rock's social butterflies at charity functions and publishes them in glossy color. It's put out as part of the empire of the Arkansas Business Publishing Group, which produces a serious news product, the weekly Arkansas Business. Nobody mistakes Soiree for journalism. It's a place for social climbers to gander at each other, perhaps enviously, perhaps condescendingly. It attracts enough attention to produce ad revenue for a newspaper company in a troubled time. Such is the role and noble purpose of niche publications and cash cows, so-called. I'm not on Soiree's case. I'm on the case of Little Rock city government, mostly, and a little on the case of Jeff Hankins, president and publisher of that Arkansas Business Publishing Group. In the June issue, Soiree selected 26 "interesting" and "powerful" women in Little Rock. It featured each of them on her own full slick page, approximately half devoted to a photograph and the other to a biographical extolling. So the weekly Arkansas Times published an item this week revealing as follows: Little Rock City Director Stacy Hurst, who is vice mayor at the moment, was selected as one of these 26 women of distinction. She had her page paid for not by herself or her family's flower company, but by Little Rock's city government. Had her page paid for? You mean these women paid to be selected for this honor? Apparently. That set off all manner of howling about Soiree's having "sold editorial," which means you charge for supposed real news and fail to label the material as advertising. It also set off all manner of howling about Little Rock's taxpayers getting hit up to pay the bill, about $1,700, so that a city director could get herself written up puffily. Within 24 hours, City Hall was announcing that Vice Mayor Hurst was insisting that she reimburse the city. The free publicity she was getting was causing her to break out in ethical pangs about the publicity the taxpayers had bought for her. Also within 24 hours, I was on the phone to Jeff Hankins, the publisher. I was actually in a playful mood, since, as I've established, I don't take Soiree seriously. Hankins said he would not dispute City Hall's assertion that it had paid for Hurst's inclusion. But he would not comment on the other 25 except to say they were "promotional features." I love it when newspaper people decline to comment. So Hankins showed up later here at the office, saying he'd gathered his thoughts. He said Soiree should have labeled the women-honoring pages as a "promotional feature," which is his apparent euphemism for advertising masqueading as editorial content. He said he regretted that the honor bestowed on these fully deserving women had been diminished. He said Hurst was chosen on merit and was being hung out to dry. Then he showed me promotional material for a publication that the Little Rock daily paper is planning to launch as its answer to Soiree, to be called Arkansas Life. It seems from this material that you can buy a full-page ad contract with Arkansas Life, and, in addition to that full-page ad, get your company listed whenever the publication runs an "Elite Trends advertorial" about some product that your company sells. An "advertorial," an abomination of a word and concept, is a sell-out in which advertising is blended with supposed legitimate editorial content. In other words, this Arkansas Life will do an Elite Trends feature on, say, leather boots and purses. If you are a full-page advertiser who happens to sell leather boots and purses, you can get your name, address and phone number included on this feature. Oh, well. Soiree and Arkansas Life aren't The New York Times. They aren't even Arkansas Business. People are just trying to make a buck. Have you priced any gasoline lately? ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
