In Progress

Especially not experts. Today’s NY Times reports that Wyeth, a New Jersey-based pharmaceutical company, paid writers to write articles for placement in medical journals that advocated for its female hormone replacement therapy Prempro (one that can cause severe side effects such as cancer and cardiovascular disease for its takers). One article was published as an “Editors’ Choice” feature in May 2003 in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Now, if you were going to trust any source to give you the straight skinny on your personal health, would the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology make your list? Probably. Is it the type of source that reporters who write articles for daily newspapers would expect to be able to trust? Absolutely. So how does the process work, who selects the articles, and who writes them?

The fact is, it varies considerably from journal to journal. Some journals are peer-reviewed, some aren’t. Some only accept articles for consideration in a blind review process, some want a bio of the author included for consideration along with the piece. But this is hardly an isolated incident. As the media industry has grown to a simply unmanageable number of reporting outlets, there have been marketers waiting, watching, and wondering how exactly to best take advantage of the industry.

We know that the Bush administration got called out for their extremely unethical video press releases for various public programs, that were packaged complete with a fake reporter and various “experts” who were positioned as third party authorities and another opinion on the topic at hand. The videos were often broadcast wholesale with no edits or investigative commentary by TV news programs, and were not identified as affiliated with the administration at all.

And one of my favorite services to marvel at is NAPS. While NAPS may sound like just another pleasant afternoon diversion, it is far more sinister in nature. What the North American Precis Syndicate does for its many clients is bridge the gap between PR services and editorial staff in a most questionable way. Basically, NAPS has two sets of clients. For their company clients, NAPS acts as a PR service, developing articles that feature their clients in positive ways, and then get them into papers. For their media clients, NAPS acts as a local newswire, offering articles on a huge variety of topics, complete with artwork and formatting considered “camera-ready” that editors can just drop directly into page A3 or B1 of their newspaper.

But the articles are of course pitching their clients, and get printed as is, unlike a press release, a traditional starting point for reporters and editors for writing an article. I think it is amazing that a service like NAPS is allowed to exist, as it is entirely unethical according to traditional journalism standards. But the reason it flies so far under the radar is because NAPS works with small newspapers and circulars, nothing national. And at least some of their clients don’t seem to realize the ethical dilemma — many NAPS clients come from the nonprofit world, just hoping to get their message out as far as possible. In this way, it is a great service for them, economical and far-reaching. But NAPS also counts a number of Fortune 500 and 1000 companies as clients. In either case, the only way this would be ethical is if there was a clear mention of the client sponsorship in the article. There is not, only an introductory identifier (NAPS) as the source, similar to how Associated Press would be identified as (AP).

The dual nature of NAPS is embodied by the fact that they have two websites — one for newspapers and one for companies seeking placement. Or at least they did — both sites appear to be down, perhaps permanently, when I went looking for them today. Luckily, wonderful archive.org has done its job, and you can check out NapsNet or NapsInfo for yourself in the WayBack Machine, which seems to suggest that their websites have been down since around February of this year. Interesting. Luckily, I have an example article from their website from last year displayed above, click to expand. Guess who their client was.

Posted on December 13th, 2008 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Media, Politics, Uncategorized