Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator Read online

  Knowing now that an anonymous tip to Gawker has the power to end the career of a United States congressman took a little of the fun out of it for me. Scratch that—now my personal knowledge of Gawker’s sourcing standards scares me shitless.

  PRESS RELEASE 2.0

  When I first started in PR all of the leading web gurus were proclaiming the death of the press release. Good riddance, I thought. Journalists should care too much about what they write to churn out articles and posts based on press releases.

  I could not have been more wrong. Before long I came to see the truth: Blogs love press releases. It does every part of their job for them: The material is already written; the angle laid out; the subject newsworthy; and, since it comes from an official newswire, they can blame someone else if the story turns out to be wrong.

  As a 2010 study by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found:

  As news is posted faster, often with little enterprise reporting added, the official version of events is becoming more important. We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such.1 [emphasis mine]

  So I started putting out press releases all the time. Open a new store? Put out a press release. Launch a new product? Put out a press release. Launch a new color of a new product? Press release. A blogger might pick it up. And even if no outlets do, press releases through services like PRWeb are deliberately search-engine optimized to show up well in Google results indefinitely. Most important, investing sites like Google Finance, CNN Money, Yahoo! Finance, and Motley Fool all automatically syndicate the major release wires. If you’re a public company with a stock symbol, the good news in any release you put out shows up right in front of your most important audience: stockholders. Minutes after you put it out, it’s right there on the company’s stock page in the “Recent News” section, eagerly being read by investors and traders.

  I quickly learned that not everyone saw this as harmless, low-hanging media fruit. My instinct is not illegal profit, but for those who have it, blogs’ blind faith in press releases presents opportunities. It did for New York stockbroker Lambros Ballas: He was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission for issuing fake online press releases about the stocks of companies like Google, Disney, and Microsoft and seeding them on blogs and finance forums. On the fake news of an acquisition offer from Microsoft, shares of Local.com jumped 75 percent in one day, after which he and other traders dumped all their shares and moved on to pumping other stocks on fake news.2

  It’s stunning how much news is now driven by such releases—reputable or otherwise. A LexisNexis search of major newspapers for the words “in a press release” brings back so many results that the service actually attempts to warn you against trying, saying, “This search has been interrupted because it will return more than 3,000 results. If you continue with this search it may take some time to return this information.” Same goes for the phrase “announced today” and “told reporters.” In other words, newspapers depended on marketing spam literally too many times to count in the last year.

  A Google blog search for “said in a press release” (meaning they quoted directly from a release) brings back 307,000 results for the same period as the LexisNexis search, and more than 4 million for all time. “Announced today” brings up more than 32,000 articles for a single week. If you get specific, an internal search of TechCrunch brings up more than 5,000 articles using “announced today” and 7,000 attributed citations to press releases. This pales in comparison to the Huffington Post, whose bloggers have written the words “announced today” more than 50,000 times and cited press releases more than 200,000 times. And, of course, there is also talkingpointsmemo.com, whose name unintentionally reveals what most blogs and newspapers carelessly pass on to their readers: prewritten talking points from the powers that be.

  Anyone can now be that power. Anyone can give blogs their talking points. To call it a sellers’ market is an understatement. But it’s the only thing I can think of that comes close to describing a medium in which dominant personalities like tech blogger Robert Scoble can nostalgically repost things on his Google+ account like the “original pitch” for publicity that the iPad start-up Flipboard had sent him.3 It’s a great time to be a media manipulator when your marks actually love receiving PR pitches.

  NOT EVEN NEEDING TO BE THE SOURCE

  Bloggers are under incredible pressure to produce, leaving little time for research or verification, let alone for speaking to sources. In some cases, the story they are chasing is so crazy that they don’t want to risk doing research, because the whole facade would collapse.

  From my experience, bloggers operate by some general rules of thumb: If a source can’t be contacted by e-mail, they probably can’t be a source. I’ve talked to bloggers on the phone only a few times, ever—but thousands of times over e-mail. If background information isn’t publicly or easily available, it probably can’t be included. Writers are at the mercy of official sources, such as press releases, spokesmen, government officials, and media kits. And these are for the instances they even bother to check anything.

  Most important, they’re at the mercy of Wikipedia, because that’s where they do their research. Too bad people like me manipulate that too. Nothing illustrates this better than the story of a man who, as a joke, changed the name of comedian and actor Russell Brand’s mother on Wikipedia from Barbara to Juliet. When Brand took his mother as his date to the Academy Awards shortly after, the Los Angeles Times ran the online headline over their picture: “Russell Brand and His Mother Juliet Brand …”

  I remember sitting on the couch at Tucker Max’s house one January a few years ago when something occurred to me about his then on-and-off-again bestseller. “Hey Tucker, did you notice your book made the New York Times list in 2006, 2007, and 2008?” (Meaning the book had appeared on the list at least once in all three years, not continuously.) So I typed it up, sourced it, and added it to Wikipedia, delineating each year.* Not long after I posted it, a journalist cribbed my “research” and did us the big favor of having poor reading comprehension. He wrote: “Tucker Max’s book has spent over 3 years on the New York Times Bestseller List.” Then we took this and doubled up our citation on Wikipedia to use this new, more generous interpretation.

  This is a cycle I have watched speed up but also descend into outright plagiarism. I can’t divulge my specifics, but I commonly see uniquely worded or selectively edited facts that paid editors inserted into Wikipedia show up later in major newspapers and blogs with the exact same wording (you’ll have to trust me on when and where).

  Wikipedia acts as a certifier of basic information for many people, including reporters. Even a subtle influence over the way that Wikipedia frames an issue—whether criminal charges, a controversial campaign, a lawsuit, or even a critical reception—can have a major impact on the way bloggers write about it. It is the difference between “So-and-so released their second album in 2011” and “So-and-so’s first album was followed by the multiplatinum and critically lauded hit …” You change the descriptors on Wikipedia and reporters and readers change their descriptors down the road.

  A complete overhaul of one high-profile starlet’s Wikipedia page was once followed less than a week later by a six-page spread in a big tabloid that so obviously used our positive and flattering language from Wikipedia that I was almost scared it would be its own scandal.

  It’s why you have to control your page. Or you risk putting yourself in the awkward position a friend found himself in when profiled by a reporter at a national newspaper, who asked: “So, according to Wikipedia you’re a failed screenwriter. Is that true?”

  TRUST ME, I’M AN EXPERT

  It’s not a stretch to convince anyone that it’s easy to become a source for blogs. Cracking the mainstream media is much harder, right? Nope. There’s actually a tool designed expressly for this purpose.

  It’s called HARO (Help a Repo
rter Out), and it is a site that connects hundreds of “self-interested sources” to willing reporters every day. The service, founded by PR man Peter Shankman, is a wildly popular tool that connects journalists working on stories with people to quote in them. It is the de facto sourcing and lead factory for journalists and publicists. According to the site, nearly thirty thousand members of the media have used HARO sources, including the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Huffington Post, and everyone in-between.

  What do these experts get out of offering their services? Free publicity, of course. In fact, “Free Publicity” is HARO’s tagline. I’ve used it myself to con reporters from ABC News to Reuters to the Today Show, and yes, even the vaunted New York Times. Sometimes I don’t even do it myself. I just have an assistant pretend to be me over e-mail or on the phone.

  The fact that my eyes light up when I think of how to use HARO’s services to benefit myself and my clients should be illustrative. If I was tasked with building someone’s reputation as an “industry expert,” it would take nothing but a few fake e-mail addresses and speedy responses to the right bloggers to manufacture the impression. I’d start with using HARO to get quoted on a blog that didn’t care much about credentials, then use that piece as a marker of authority to justify inclusion in a more reputable publication. It wouldn’t take long to be a “nationally recognized expert who has been featured in _____, _____, and _____.” The only problem is that it wouldn’t be real.

  Journalists say HARO is a research tool, but it isn’t. It is a tool that manufactures self-promotion to look like research. Consider alerts like

  URGENT: [E-mail redacted]@aol.com needs NEW and LITTLE known resources (apps, Websites, etc.) that offer families unique ways to save money.*

  This is not a noble effort by a reporter to be educated but an all too common example of a lazy blogger giving a marketer an opportunity to insert themselves into their story. Journalists also love to put out bulletins asking for sources to support stories they are already writing.

  [E-mail Redacted]@gmail.com needs horror story relating to mortgages, student loans, credit reports, debt collectors, or credit cards.

  URGENT: [E-mail Redacted]@abc.com is looking for a man who took on a new role around the house after losing his job.

  There you have it—how your bogus trend-story sausage is made. In fact, I even saw one HARO request by a reporter hoping “to speak with an expert about how fads are created.” I hope whoever answered it explained that masturbatory media coverage from people like her has a lot to do with it.

  What HARO encourages—and the site is filled with thousands of posts asking for it—is for journalists to look for sources who simply confirm what they were already intending to say. Instead of researching a topic and communicating their findings to the public, journalists simply grab obligatory—but artificial—quotes from “experts” to validate their pageview journalism. To the readers it appears as legitimate news. To the journalist, they were just reverse engineering their story from a search engine–friendly premise.

  HARO also helps bloggers create the false impression of balance. Nobody is speaking to sources on both sides. They’re providing token space to the opposition and nothing else. It is a sham. I constantly receive e-mails from bloggers and journalists asking me to provide “a response” to some absurd rumor or speculative analysis. They just need a quote from me denying the rumor (which most people will skip over) to justify publishing it.

  Most stories online are created with this mind-set. Marketing shills masquerade as legitimate experts, giving advice and commenting on issues in ways that benefit their clients and trick people into buying their products. Blogs aren’t held accountable for being wrong or being played, so why should they avoid it?

  FORGETTING MY OWN BULLSHIT

  As I was gathering up press done on me personally over the years, I came across an article I’d forgotten. I’d posted a question on my blog: “What is the classic book of the ’80s and ’90s?” It was a discussion I’d had with several friends; we were wondering what book teachers would assign to students to learn about this era fifty years from now. This discussion was picked up and featured by Marginal Revolution, a blog by the economist Tyler Cowen, which does about fifty thousand pageviews a day. His post said:

  What is the classic book of the ’80s and ’90s?

  BY TYLER COWEN ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2008 AT 6:42 PM IN BOOKS | PERMALINK

  That’s Ryan Holiday’s query. This is not about quality, this is about “representing a literary era” or perhaps just representing the era itself. I’ll cite Bonfire of the Vanities and Fight Club as the obvious picks. Loyal MR reader Jeff Ritze is thinking of Easton Ellis (“though not American Psycho”). How about you? Dare I mention John Grisham’s The Firm as embodying the blockbuster trend of King, Steele, Clancy, and others? There’s always Harry Potter and graphic novels.

  Coming across this struck me not only because I am a big Tyler Cowen fan but because I am also Jeff Ritze. Or was, since that’s one of the fake names I used to use, and had apparently e-mailed my post as a tip to Marginal Revolution. Of course Jeff Ritze was thinking about Bret Easton Ellis—he’s one of my favorite authors. I even answered a variant of that question as me—Ryan Holiday—a few years later for a magazine that was interviewing me.

  I had been the source of this article and totally forgotten about it. I wanted traffic for my site, so I tricked Tyler, and he linked to me. (Sorry, Tyler!) It paid off too. A blog for the Los Angeles Times picked up the discussion from Cowen’s blog and talked positively about “twentysomething Ryan Holiday.” Marginal Revolution is a widely read and influential blog, and I never would have popped up on the Los Angeles Times’s radar without it. Best of all, now, when I write my bio, I get to list the Los Angeles Times as one of the places I’ve gotten coverage. Score.

  * On occasion I have instructed a client to say something in an interview, knowing that once it is covered we can insert it into Wikipedia, and it will become part of the standard media narrative about them. We seek out interviews in order to advance certain “facts,” and then we make them doubly real by citing them on Wikipedia.

  * Ten days later the reporter generously gave a second marketer a chance at the same story, with this request: “URGENT: [E-mail redacted]@aol.com needs NEW or LITTLE known app or website that can help families with young kids save money.”

  VI

  TACTIC #3

  GIVE THEM WHAT SPREADS, NOT WHAT’S GOOD

  THE ADVICE THAT MIT MEDIA STUDIES PROFESSOR Henry Jenkins gives publishers and companies is blunt: “If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” With social sharing comes traffic, and with traffic comes money. Something that isn’t shared isn’t worth anything.

  For someone tasked with advancing narratives in the media, the flip side of this advice is equally straightforward: If it spreads, you’re golden. Blogs don’t have the resources to advertise their posts, and bloggers certainly don’t have the time to work out a publicity launch for something they’ve written. Every blog, publisher, and oversharer in your Facebook feed is constantly looking to post things that will take on a life of their own and get attention, links, and new readers with the least work possible. Whether that content is accurate, important, or helpful doesn’t even register on their list of priorities.

  If the quality of their content doesn’t matter to bloggers, do you think it’s going to matter to marketers? It’s never mattered to me. So I design what I sell to bloggers based on what I know (and they think) will spread. I give them what they think will go viral online—and make them money.

  A TALE OF TWO CITY SLIDE SHOWS

  If you’re like me, you’ve sat and stared in fascination at the pictures of the ruins of Detroit that get passed around the Internet. We’ve all gaped at the stunning shots of the cavelike interior of the decaying United Artists Theater and the towering Michigan Central Station that resembles an abandoned Gothic cathedral. These beautiful high-res photo slideshows are impressiv
e pieces of online photojournalism…or so you think.

  Like everyone else, I ate up these slideshows, and I even harbored a guilty desire to go to Detroit and walk through the ruins. My friends know this and send me the newest ones as soon as they come out. When I see the photos I can’t help thinking of this line from Fight Club:

  In the world I see, you’re stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center.…You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.

  To see a broken, abandoned American city is a moving, nearly spiritual experience, one you are immediately provoked to share with everyone you know.

  A slideshow that generates a reaction like that is online gold. An ordinary blog post is only one page long, so a thousand-word article about Detroit would get one pageview per viewer. A slideshow about Detroit gets twenty per user, hundreds of thousands of times over, while premium advertising rates are charged against the photos. A recent twenty-picture display posted by the Huffington Post was commented on more than four thousand times and liked twenty-five thousand times on Facebook. And that was the second time they’d posted it. The New York Times’s website has two of their own, for a total of twenty-three photos. The Guardian’s website has a sixteen-pager. Time.com’s eleven-pager is the top Google result for “Detroit photos.” We’re talking about millions of views combined.

  One would think that any photo of Detroit would be an instant hit online. Not so. A series of beautiful but sad photographs of foreclosed and crumbling Detroit houses and their haggard residents was posted on Magnum Photos’s site in 2009, well before most of the others. It shows the same architectural devastation, the same poverty and decline. While the slideshow on the Huffington Post received four thousand comments within days, these photos got twenty-one comments over two years.1