Press Releases Masquerading as News

The past several months have been such an intense time to be a world citizen and investor that I thought I would share with you something much lighter today.  Something light, but that eats at me like a slow reacting acid.  Namely, the increase in press releases, and much more often, product releases, masquerading as “news.”

I have long decried this trend of poor journalism as a dilution of the quality of information.  Sadly, it is that information that is the raw material of investment decision making.  Ugh!  One of the final holdouts against this slide in quality information has been the Wall Street Journal.  Imagine my surprise then when I saw the following “news piece” that I will quote in its massive entirety:

“The Music Nerd’s Choice

Yes, there is the iPhone and the iPod Touch, but with 32GB memories that top out at about 750 albums, they just don’t cut it for serious record collections. With 160GB of hard-drive space, the iPod Classic can hold around 3,200 albums, making it the only choice for the kind of collector who needs to switch from Lady Gaga to “Lady Day” and all genres and subgenres, and sub-subgenres, in between. It won’t let you check your email, buy more tunes on the fly or check sports scores, but in this multitasking era of tweets, Facebook feeds and other instant distractions, there’s something appealing about a device that does one thing well: rock out.”

Are you kidding me?  This is not news; this is a product spec sheet that could have been published by Apple itself.  Is the Wall Street Journal an Apple shill?  Probably not.  This is just lazy, no, very lazy “journalism.”  For god sakes it’s not even a product review!

You may say this is harmless.  But I disagree.  In the modern era where “search engine optimization” is king, these stories are simply designed to attract folks who are hunting around on the web for information.

So you are at Google or Bing and want information on the iPod classic and you see that the Wall Street Journal has a write up about the product.  You click on it and you get the schlock I quoted above.  When you arrive you then notice that you have been sucked into a WSJ vortex where there are any number of other similar articles.  Now you are stuck on the WSJ site.  Their average length of stay goes up and so then does their ability to raise their advertising rates.
One of my consistent criticisms of capitalism is the unequal exchange between business and individual.  Sometimes the consumer wins.  Sometimes business wins.  But if too many exchanges are unequal then exchanges of any kind are questioned (think: the culture of greed and graft of South America and Africa), resulting in a diminished potency of capitalism (something I consider to be a great good for the planet).

In the example above the only winner is the Wall Street Journal; an organization that was one of the last holdouts of quality information gathering and journalism.

Jason