Journalists at the Daily Mirror have been offered bonuses to write sponsored articles promoting household products as the newspaper’s publisher for new sources of revenue.
Staff at Reach, which also owns the Express and regional titles including the Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo, have been offered an extra £60 if they create “affiliate content” that generates more than £600 in revenues.
The scheme, dubbed the “affiliates cash challenge”, was recently expanded to increase the maximum monthly amount payable from £120 to £180.
Reach has stepped up its focus on sponsored content as it grapples with a sharp decline in advertising revenues.
You’d think that someone in the same business would be able to write an article about it. No, this isn’t “sponsored” at all, This is affiliate, as it says. Write an article “My God this is 80% off at Amazon today!” and when the folk pile in to buy it from Amazoin then the Mirror gets 4% (or whatever it is) as a commission from Amazon.
Sponsored means the Mirror is being paid by an advertise. Afficilate means hoping to be paid on commission.
Sigh.
On the other hand it would be easy-peasy to round up an army of folk to write such pieces for 10% of the Mirror’s affiliate take on them. Jeebus, bite yer hand off.
Isn’t that what they usually do anyway? And very much pretend they’re not, because…. “independent”?
Journalism is going the way of the streetlamp lighter, isn’t it? It’s only inertia now that’s keeping the profession going.
That’s because there are very few actual journalists – that is, people who maintain a dispassionate journal of events – left. They’ve become activists or jobbing op-ed writers. With the social media megaphone anyone can now carry out any of these activities. Us, right here, for example.
What about the idea of the trusted, researched, impartial news source supposedly embodied by the Newspapers of Record and the great broadcasting corporations? It was always a chimera and over the last few decades those bastions of trusted media seem to have deliberately gone out of their way to confirm this. Their decline is what you get if you shit on your own doorstep.
The Daily Mirror employs journalists?
The MEN is just a mouthpiece for Belsen Burnham. Not sure about Liverpool Echo, I have a friend of a friend who works for BBC Merseyside or whatever. I’d imagine the Echo is even more rabidly Leftard.
In Yorkshire the YP and YEP are so far up the Corrie actresses arse they’re cleaning her teeth from the inside.
And then we have local rag of my “beloved” hometown of the Islamic Republic of Bradistan…words fail about how biased they are.
I’m looking forward to the next elections, local or national, they’re aren’t enough postal votes or Imams to stop Reform in my ward.
Norman,
We don’t need journalists of that sort.
If you had a church in a city burning, someone would phone the police, fire, then the press would get wind of it and send a news crew. Now, there’s going to be 100 people on the street who live nearby filming it, posting it on Twitter and YouTube before the news crew arrives and all the sharing, algorithms etc will propagate it to millions.
The other purpose is analysis of things but the truth is, most journalists are writing types, not subject experts (wine is the exception). They can’t explain the precious metals thing, or what a derivative is, or what a SQL Injection Attack is.
WB, I know. When I was a kid I was an aviation nut and read the specialist press, written by subject experts. Then I’d read aviation reports in the papers and be shocked at the basic errors in them. After a while it occurred to me that if these articles were wrong, all the rest on all the other subjects probably were, too.