Editorial Communications is 'Media as a Service' — not 'Brand Journalism'

Loren Maxwell visits the strange world of "Brand Journalism" and content marketing in his recent post: Traditional Journalists, Brand Journalists Divided In Controversy Over Brand Journalism

2010 marks the beginning of the Content Marketing Institute, which recognized that throughout hundreds of years, one thing was consistent, “Brands have been telling stories for centuries”.

True, brands tell stories and journalists tell stories — but storytelling is not journalism.

What has emerged is a world, where journalism is split between traditional journalism (predominately news, reporting, and gathering of facts and information), and brand journalism (corporations telling stories to engage with their markets). The lines of journalism are becoming blurred. 

Maxwell makes a grave error in his post: Journalism is most certainly not split "between traditional journalism" and "brand journalism." There are not two lines of journalism.

I have never met a brand journalist because there is no such thing as a brand journalist. ("Hi, I'm a journalist with Hugo Boss," it would be ridiculous.)

The new boss is not like the old boss...

The term "brand journalism" is used by corporate PR and  PR agencies to confer a higher status to the content marketing they produce — which nearly always comes out looking like marketing or corporate PR.

The type of content companies want when that use the term "content marketing" is best described as "editorial content." 

New boss is not the same as the old boss...

Some companies hire journalists to write high quality journalistic, editorial content. But the problem is that such ventures are not editorially led, the new boss is nothing like the old boss at the newspaper. The new boss is a marketing exec or a corporate/agency PR exec.

And that's why the resulting content invariably looks like marketing or PR. Which is an Epic Fail because a company already has marketing and corporate PR content. It doesn't want more of the same.  

To produce editorial content requires a different approach. Companies need to think about how they can establish a media organization that is independent of marketing, PR, or any other corporate department.

And this new corporate organization must be editorially led; the new boss has to be very much like the old boss if you want to get the best from experienced journalists. 

Editorial Communications is MaaS...

- Editorial communications is journalistic but doesn't hide that it is corporate media, as "native advertising" tries to do. 

- Editorial communications is a way to surface the authenticity within an organization, its stories, its people, and its values. 

- Editorial communications is not produced by a marketing department or corporate PR department. Those continue to do what they do. 

- A media organization provides a service, e.g., The Wall Street Journal provides a financial news service — Media as a Service (MaaS). Editorial communications should create content that is of service, and not constantly self-serving. [It's OK to produce some self-serving content but the ratio should be at least 5 to 1, if not higher.]

- It looks nothing like marketing or PR communications because every company already produces that type of content. 

- And it certainly is not "brand journalism," it is "editorial communications" — a more honest and accurate term, and far less controversial.