Beyond clickbait and commerce

Denis Muller
year history.’ Underneath this were the standard social-media
sharing options for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and then
a large full-colour photograph of Mr Miscavige surrounded by
Scientology symbols.
Above the main headline in much smaller type but highlighted in
a yellow bar were the words ‘sponsor content’ and a pale grey bar
attached to it reading ‘What’s this?’ By mousing over this, a reader
would reveal the following statement:
Sponsor Content is created by The Atlantic’s Promotions
Department in partnership with our advertisers. The Atlantic
editorial team is not involved in the creation of this content.
The item remained up on The Atlantic’s website for about 11 hours
before an avalanche of criticism from staff and readers alike forced
a take-down. The magazine then issued a frank apology beginning
with the pungent statement, ‘We screwed up’. It admitted
not having sufficiently thought through its policies concerning
sponsored content and said it was working hard to put things
right. However, it also said that it remained ‘committed to and
enthusiastic about innovation in digital advertising’.
In a critique of this episode, the Poynter Institute (Moos 2013)
raised a number of ethical challenges: What standards were applied
for accepting sponsored content? How was sponsored content
created? What safeguards exist to prevent conflicts between
sponsored content and real editorial content? Is the process for
moderating online comment on sponsored content the same as,
or different from, the process for moderating comment on other
content? How transparent is the publisher obliged to be with
readers about the way sponsored content is handled?
This list does not exhaust the possibilities. A central challenge is
this: what steps need to be taken to minimise the risk of a reader’s
being duped into mistaking sponsored content for real editorial
content – content that keeps the promises of journalism?
Clearly, The Atlantic failed this challenge spectacularly. The very
phrase ‘sponsor content’ made no grammatical connection with
the neighbouring material. To do so, it needed the participle
‘sponsored’ otherwise it might be read as simply a general label
about sponsors at large. Requiring the reader to mouse over a
small pale grey panel to find out what it means was an exercise in
opacity, not transparency.
To its credit, within a month of the original publication, The Atlantic
published a revised set of policies concerning sponsored content.
They focused on the key issue of transparency, and included a rule
102 Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016