Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (38 page)

Some examples:

TechCrunch
hosts TechCrunch Disrupt

AllThingsDigital
hosts D: All Things Digital Conference

PSFK
hosts PSFK Salons

Mashable
hosts the Mashable Connect Conference

GigaOm
hosts six different conferences

COVERAGE ABOUT COVERAGE

Within hours of the death of Osama bin Laden, before the body was even cold, blogs were already writing the story of how the story broke. From FastCompany.com (“Osama Bin Laden Dead, The Story Twitter Broke”) to the
New York Times
’s
Media Decoder
blog (“How the Bin Laden Announcement Leaked Out”), dozens of blogs quickly moved from reporting the news to reporting news about the news.

Coverage about coverage is
not
more coverage, though it may feel like it. One is information we can make use of—for example, it’s important to know that a killer like bin Laden is no longer a threat to our physical safety. The other is worthless filler—news that tells us how we were told about the news. Yet blogs write these stories because they are easy, because they are self-promotional and glorifying, and because they make them seem relevant by their association with actually important news.

There is a subset of this coverage that is all the more preposterous. Every few months blogs trot out the tired old story of how to pitch coverage to them. They advise publicists to do a better job e-mailing the blogger and assuaging their ego if they want the blogger to write about their clients. From a reader’s perspective this is all rather strange. Why is the blog revealing how it can be manipulated? In turn, why do we not head for the hills when it is clear that blogs pass this manipulation on to us?

Some favorite headlines:

Rules of Thumb for Pitching Silly Claims to TechCrunch (
TechCrunch
)

How Not to Pitch a Blogger, #648 (
ReadWriteWeb
)

DEAR PR FOLKS: Please Stop Sending Us “Experts” and “Story Ideas”—Here’s What to Send Us Instead (
Business Insider
)

A private note to PR people (Scobleizer.com)

How to Pitch a Blogger (as in,
Brazen Careerist
, the blogger writing it)

The Do’s and Don’ts of Online Publicity, for Some Reason (Lindsay Robertson,
Jezebel
,
NYMag
,
Huffington Post
)

The unintended consequence of that kind of coverage is that it is essentially a manual with step-by-step instructions on how to infiltrate and deceive that blogger with marketing. I used to be thankful when I’d see that; now I just wonder: Why are you doing this to yourselves?

TOO LOW-HANGING FRUIT

Nothing tires me more than the convergence of moronic marketers and bloggers with little regard for the truth.

At least my plays involved some level of elaborate strategy. I’ll grant that what I do can be difficult to defend against. It’s one thing when it is possible to plant a story; it’s another entirely when blogs write stories about how people plant stories on their site. It’s another still when the readers are tricked into speculating about how companies can do a better job covering up disasters or blunders.

Only when you see this type of coverage for what it is—lazy, cheap, and self-interested—does it lose its allure; only then can you stop watching your own manipulation as entertainment.

The media and the public are supposed to be on the same side. The media, when it’s functioning properly, protects the public against marketers and their ceaseless attempts to trick people into buying things. I’ve come to realize that that is not how it is today. Marketers and the media—me and the bloggers—we’re on the same team, and way too often you are played into watching with rapt attention as we deceive you. And you don’t even know that’s going on because the content you get has been dressed up and fed to you as news.

*
Especially for
BuzzFeed,
which uses this information in collaboration with paying brands to make their “advertorial” content more viral.

XXI

THE DARK SIDE OF SNARK

WHEN INTERNET HUMOR ATTACKS

ONCE, KNOWING A CLIENT WAS ABOUT TO BE HIT WITH a questionable lawsuit (a shakedown via the media), I suggested we respond by embracing the absurdity rather than fighting against it. The first thing we did was file a countersuit that included all sorts of completely trivial but hilarious details about the plaintiff, along with other juicy bits of gossip. Then I sent both our lawsuit and the original to bloggers—and instead of denouncing or denying anything—I made some jokes in my e-mail. It was all to hint: Make fun of the lawsuit instead of taking it seriously.

Humor is an incredibly effective vehicle for getting pageviews and spreading narratives. So I made the easiest story for blogs to write the one in which they made snarky fun of the entire mess. To me that was better than having a serious discussion about a seriously
untrue
claim against my client. Plus, after the first blog gave the plaintiff (instead of the defendant, my client) the rougher treatment, all the other blogs outdid themselves to give it worse. They made the other party the fool instead of us and ignored any of the potentially negative accusations in the lawsuit.

In this case I felt the end justified the means, since the original lawsuit was dubious. It saved us from being unfairly criticized. Yet it struck me how easy it was to use snark to distract the media and shift the nature of their coverage. I saw that encouraging snark worked just as well for untrue facts as it does for true ones. And that it was impossible to truly control.

Though it worked to my advantage this one time, I’ve seen this impulse to mock and snark exact incredible costs on clients. I’m sure that sounds weird, because humor seems like such an innocent thing. It seems that way until you watch a client say something that a blogger misconstrues in order to make fun of them. Or you see some site air a suspect accusation against someone—say, that a politician had an affair—and then other blogs, readers, and comedians use that as material to make snarky jokes. The way they see it, it’s not their job to prove whether the accusation is true. They’re entertainers. The whole subject’s sketchy or inaccurate origins get lost once the jokes pile up. All that matters is that people are talking about it. And once blogs do this, they will not relent. Not until the subject is reduced to a permanent caricature.

DEFINING SNARK

New Yorker
critic David Denby came closest to properly defining snark in his book
Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation
. He didn’t succeed entirely, but “[s]nark attempts to steal someone’s mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness [with] the nasty, insidious, rug-pulling, teasing insult, which makes reference to some generally understood shared prejudice or distaste” will do.