Please Stop Calling Content Marketing "Brand Journalism"

I used to be a journalist. Past tense. I loved working for newspapers and magazines, which I did for about 15 years – back in the day when newsrooms weren't yet obsessed with online analytics.

We produced articles for the sake of informing or entertaining our readers. The content was the product. If there were any associated business goals, they were primarily to keep the existing readers and subscribers happy and to attract new ones.

Now, I'm a content marketer, producing content for a company that provides benefits and discounts to educators. Our content helps to build awareness among potential customers, cultivate relationships with our current and future customers, and encourage our audience to participate in the products and services we offer.

Content marketing is marketing, not journalism

Whenever I hear someone earnestly refer to content marketing as "brand journalism," I'm pretty sure my blood pressure rises a few points.

Let's break it down: "Brand journalism" is an oxymoron because...

• Brands have a vested interest in making themselves look good and convincing people to pay for their products or services.
  
  
• Journalists should not have a vested interest in promoting any business's PR or sales objectives.

The word "journalism" overstates, even misstates, what content marketing is, which is why "brand journalism" is a disingenuous label.

Traditional media used to be the only game in town

Journalism should be agenda-less, agnostic and objective. Journalists should cover both sides of a story, giving the audience a clear, accurate and unbiased account.

To accomplish that, there has to be a "separation of church and state," a term you've likely become aware of as native advertising increasingly infiltrates news platforms.

The journalism industry is supported in part by advertising dollars; businesses pay for their ad spots, which ideally look very different from the format of the articles around them. There should be a thick black line – metaphorically and even literally – between the ads and the articles.

Advertisers, salespeople and PR folks want as much attention as possible on their company's activities, and some of them try to step over that black line by asking journalists for the moon to see how much they can get away with. The journalists, in turn, must say no to all inappropriate, unethical requests.

On a news organization's own platform, such biased write-ups, paid mentions of companies and even free content that includes "expert sources" that are actually a PR flack's paying clients would represent serious conflicts of interest that don't serve the audience, thereby undermining the publication's credibility. Anything with an agenda should not masquerade as editorial.

Now, however, we're in a new era in which brands are becoming publishers because they have their own online platforms where they can distribute content that supports their business goals. Companies no longer need to fight for media coverage because now they can effectively publish and distribute content themselves.

Content marketing plays a different role

The content that brands produce certainly can be helpful, informative, entertaining and valuable, and we should be authorities in our areas of expertise. But given that content marketing is ultimately meant to encourage people to buy a company's products or employ its services, can that content really be agnostic and objective, aka journalism?

People expect news organizations to be wholly unbiased, but they don't necessarily have the same expectation of brands. Content on our own platforms can be consumed in context: Our audiences know the information they're receiving is from a brand, and they understand that although it may not be completely objective, it still can be useful and relevant. This transparency is critical as we foster meaningful relationships with our current and future customers.

Jason Miller of LinkedIn offered this advice in a recent Curata SlideShare about content marketing metrics: “At the end of the day, why are we doing this? The answer is for more leads. If the leads that are coming into your pipeline are more qualified based on the engagement with your content and are closer to buying, then your content strategy is working.”

That's a fantastic way to evaluate your content marketing, right? But if you asked a news organization why it's writing articles, producing videos, etc., the answer absolutely would not be "to get more qualified sales leads." Therein lies the difference.

So even though I employ my journalistic skills in my role as a content marketer, I would never call what I do "brand journalism," even when the content is informational rather than promotional.

To be clear, my beef is only with the term "brand journalism." Content marketing is my jam now. I really enjoy it. I'm all about providing information that will educate our audience, make them smarter consumers of our products and enrich their lives.

Whether it's B2B or B2C, people are researching and making purchase decisions every day, and content marketers help them gather information and evaluate their options so they can spend their money wisely. That's not a role that newspapers can, or should, fill.

What we, as content marketers, are doing is important, both for the companies that employ us and for the audiences we're helping. We don't need to label content marketing as "journalism" to make it feel important.

NOTE: This post was inspired by Contently's Oct. 13 post titled "Why You Need to Stop Using the Term 'Brand Journalism' " (which I totally agree with) and Scribewise's Oct. 14 rebuttal "Content Marketing & Journalism: Not As Different As They're Telling You" (which left me reaching for my blood pressure monitor).

Photo credit: Mark Turnauckas via Flickr