Though the emergence of social media has smudged the professional line between us somewhat, any thinking human being can still tell the difference. Here’s an example of marketing. Here’s journalism. We are diametrically opposed in our aims, if not the skills we require. The goal of journalism is to tell the story no matter how tough it is – no matter how complicated the issue is, or how corrupt the politician is, or how sad the girl was. The goal of marketing is to spin that story into something that people will buy. Mixing the two is not only ethically questionable, it sinks tricky truths into the ether.
Let’s take a look at this unwanted marriage in the context of activism – specifically that of Nicholas Kristof, a NY Times bestselling author and reporter who’s been lauded for his work’s impact on social justice and has even been featured in his own documentary. In an article for Outside magazine, Kristof writes about the benefits of employing marketing techniques in journalism. Rather than “come back [from developing nations]… with stories of impoverished villages,” Kristof advises wannabe do-gooders to tell “stories about a particular 12-year-old girl who, if she received just $10 a month, could stay in school. Make people feel lucky that they have the opportunity to assist her, so that they'll find helping her every bit as refreshing as, say, drinking a Pepsi.”.
Yet Kristof’s stories are problematic exactly because of these techniques. His columns, while they garner readership, tend to simplify issues for the sake of dramatics and blur the bigger picture.
The fact is that solving world poverty requires broader understanding than a story of a hungry girl in rural India can provide. It requires informed insights into complex issues like how to provide sex education for women who drop out of middle school and how to administer malaria medications across war-torn borders to kids in rural villages. The most effective U.S. aid has targeted larger issues such as these, not individuals.
As providers of accurate commentary and updaters on what’s going on in the real world, journalists need to reflect that understanding in their stories rather than simplify them to make them more palatable to the public. The latter is advertising, not accuracy. It’s selling a solution that won’t solve much. We may “feel refreshed” by helping the girl in India, but that doesn’t mean we’re doing the best thing for her.
The solution to this storytelling problem is complicated. People magazine is a better beach read than organic chemistry because it's about, well, people - and we're genetically programmed to like stories that seem to be about us. That's why Kristof's technique is so effective. But a good journalist can weave these smaller pictures into the bigger issues without sacrificing the gripping quality of their storytelling. When Rebecca Skloot wrote The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, she set out to tell the story of a biracial woman whose unusual cancer cells were taken by doctors for experiments without her knowledge, consent or compensation. She followed the Lacks family narrative for 13 years to get the full picture of what was going on, and the book she wrote discusses incredibly complicated issues of race and genetic ownership through that narrative. She's been pushing these issues into public discourse ever since. That's good journalism.
I’m not saying that marketing is morally inferior or in some way to journalism - it's not. It’s often incredibly smart and effective, often necessary for businesses and organizations, and can be the most efficient technique for spreading awareness about problems that are easy to grasp, like childhood smoking. The zany, often-irreverent “No Stank You” campaign helped reduce smoking among Washington state eighth-graders by 60 percent, for example.
All I'm saying is the publication I worked for last summer had separate, walled-off wings for its editorial and marketing departments. That separation shouldn’t stop in the building.