Five months ago, the magazine industry was stung by allegations in The Wall Street Journal that Esquire had killed an article after Chrysler threatened to pull its ads from the magazine. Mixed into the bad PR was the revelation that Chrysler's ad buyer, PentaCom, had written to 50 publications demanding that the company "be alerted in advance of any and all editorial content that encompasses sexual, political, social issues or any editorial that might be construed as provocative or offensive. Each and every issue that carries Chrysler advertising requires a written summary outlining major theme/articles appearing in upcoming issues."
Earlier this week, largely in response to the Chrysler/Esquire case, the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Magazine Publishers of America issued a statement declaring that "magazines should not submit table of contents, text, or photos from upcoming issues to advertisers for prior review."
The statement was praised as a watershed by many in the magazine and journalism industry. But it would appear to do little to change the status quo.
"It draws an important line in the sand, which advertisers and publishers will think twice before crossing," said Marshall Loeb, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. "It is an important step to give editors a weapon, a standard so that if they are approached by publishers with a request indirectly or directly from an advertiser, the editor can say, 'Of course we can't do that; look at the statement.'"
The statement may hand an easy way out to editors who would have had a hard time taking such a stand on their own, but many feel that the policy will hardly scratch the surface of a problem that has existed since the advent of advertising.
"I don't think it will have any real effect, but it's a good way for the associations to cover their asses and to sound quite virtuous," said John Stauber, editor of PR Watch and co-author of the book, Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry. "Magazines are in business to make money from subscribers and advertisers; and the big, quick-and-easy money is in pleasing advertisers. I don't see this changing anything in terms of the day-to-day operations of these businesses."
Major media have always struggled to strike a balance in catering to their two sources of revenue: readers and advertisers. Established magazines today draw revenue in practically equal parts from circulation and advertising, said University of Mississippi journalism professor Samir Husni. And advertisers aren't unlike readers - they spend their money on publications that address their needs and interests.
"I don't feel that this is a new trend," said Magazine Publishers of America president Don Kummerfeld. "The Chrysler letter was a dramatic highlight to something that's been going on for many, many years. But it's not really different from many of the things that companies have communicated before."
Advertisers' actions haven't changed, but the magazine landscape has. With hundreds of new magazines set to hit newsstands in the coming year, all competing with each other and with established magazines for an essentially unchanged pot of advertising dollars, "there's been some intensification of the problem, with more media competing for the same advertisers," said CJR's Loeb.
In this milieu, established magazines - which rely much more heavily on ad dollars than do newer publications, which tend to carry higher cover prices - find themselves under pressure to bow to advertisers' desires. "One has been hearing more and more complaints about this from editors about pressure from advertisers," said Loeb.
New media, old problems
Online media makes the competition even tougher.
"As tough as it is to make money in the print magazine business, it's even tougher to make money on the Web," said Lewis Perdue, a journalist and author who founded WebEthics.com to advocate higher journalistic ethics and disclosure of financial motives online. Despite the fact that Internet ad revenue is jumping - Electronic Advertising & Marketing Report found a 187.2 percent rise between August 1996 and August 1997 - the take is a drop in the bucket compared to print ad revenue.
"I think there's a desperation that drives the conflict of interest in print, and it's only more prevalent on the Web," Perdue said.
Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Media Education, a public-interest advocacy group that works on new-media issues, put it more bluntly: "At a time when the division between advertising and editorial are more or less obliterated, it's creating a new-media hybrid where advertising is the head and editorial is the legs."
Advertiser demand for influence over content has been even greater in new media than it has been for established media. In its infancy, online publishing has had no set standards - and the technology that gave birth to it has made for easy mutations, like sponsored areas of Web sites. At the same time, most new-media concerns have an even harder time making a buck than the old print types, so deals with advertisers can be all the more tempting.
"The model for the online world is that advertisers are oftentimes collaborating in the creation of the editorial product, whose goal it is to sell the product or brand," said Chester. He believes that the influence of advertisers and sponsors over online content creates pressure in the print world to allow advertisers into editorial offices. "That's very dangerous, because it threatens to pollute or transform the range of information that is important for people's decision-making process in our democracy."
All bark, little bite
Both the American Society of Magazine Editors and the Magazine Publishers of America admit that their joint statement is hardly earth-shaking.
"We are really addressing what is already an accepted standard," said Frank Lalli, managing editor of Money magazine and president of ASME. "Magazines have not been making their material available to advertisers on a systematic basis. There have been isolated anecdotes about it. Now that we've laid out clear guidelines, we don't expect any to do it."
If editors or publishers ignore the statement, the associations say they have an effective stick: They will exclude transgressors from the National Magazine Awards. Lalli said writers and editors "would think twice about working for a publication where you know that, at the end of the year, your work is not going to be eligible for national recognition."
Whether or not magazines comply, there are plenty of critics who say the statement is just a lot of hot air.
"We'd be kidding ourselves to say that there remains a division" between advertising and editorial content, said Ole Miss professor Husni. "Some magazines are more clever than others in trying to provide information without saying, 'We're selling out,' but the more specialized the magazine, the more they have to cater to the needs to the advertisers."
That's not necessarily bad, he argued, as long as it's honest. "I think they're barking up the wrong tree. The problem is when you literally cannot tell the difference between advertisements and editorial."
Even the organizations that issued the statement admit that it stops far short of encouraging an about-face in advertiser/magazine relations.
"This does not mean that publications and their salespeople will be discouraged from alerting advertisers to the upcoming stories or special issues that might appeal to their markets," said MPA's Kummerfeld. "That kind of stuff will go on forever. We're just making this statement to focus on the issue of actual censorship, of allowing advertisers to give specific feedback on contents before they're published."
If the statement is to be effective, it will be as a result of the dialogue it creates, said Abe Peck, acting dean of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
"If this statement by the trade organizations is the only objection that people make, and they don't explore who is really editing publications, then there will be continued problems," he said. "If it's the only stand that people take, then it doesn't solve the slippery slope that's been going on for a long time - it's only a small step in the right direction."
