The invasion of corporate news

Great piece on corporate journalism from the FT. "The Richmond Standard is one of the more polished sites to emerge in the age of hyper-local digital news brands such as Patch and DNAinfo.com... it is run and funded by Chevron, the $240bn oil group which owns the Richmond refinery that in August 2012 caught fire... sending more than 15,000 residents to hospital for medical help... Its editor... works for a public relations firm ... which offers clients advice on “issues management”... Chevron is planning a billion-dollar upgrade that environmentalists oppose." This is just an example of a wider trend: "For every working journalist in America, there are now 4.6 PR people... up from 3.2 a decade ago. And those journalists earn on average 65 per cent of what their PR peers are paid.... PRs are now playing the news industry at its own game. They are discovering how to work around journalists, getting their own slickly produced stories, videos and graphics straight to their target audiences – often with the help of the very news organisations they are subverting.... The pressures on news outlets to become multimedia, interactive, 24-hour engagement machines mean editors have become increasingly receptive to what PRs are pitching. A hungry media swallows it up. " This is just a taste - I particularly liked the analysis of the PR around the CEO changes at Microsoft, Burberry and Ford, and was stunned to see Kurt Vonnegut presented as a pioneering 'corporate content gatherer' - an idea I mentioned to the EC around a decade ago. And then there's a good intro to native advertising. So, go read it. - The invasion of corporate news - FT.com