Beyond Advertising and Journalism : Hybrid Promotional News Discourse

K E Y W O R D S : advertising, advertorials, interdiscursivity, interpracticity, journalism, news discourse, promotional news Readers distinguish between two types of content in the press: advertisements and editorial content. However, in the last few years, media critics have expressed great concern about a blurring of the lines between these two types of content A RT I C L E 553 Beyond advertising and journalism: hybrid promotional news discourse K A R M E N E R J AV E C U N I V E R S I T Y O F L J U B L JA N A Discourse & Society Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 15(5): 553–578 10.1177/ 0957926504045032 © 2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 11, 2008 http://das.sagepub.com Downloaded from and have noted a new phenomenon, a hybrid between advertisement and editorial, a new genre commonly referred to as ‘advertorial’. Cameron and Ju-Pak (2000) synthesized conceptual definitions of other authors in defining advertorials as ‘blocks of paid-for, commercial message, featuring any object or objects that simulates the editorial content of a publication in terms of design/structure, visual/verbal content, and/or context in which it appears’ (pp. 66–7). Because advertorials are studied, above all, by advertising and public relations scholars, the existing analyses of advertorials mostly reflect their research interests, such as the type of breach of the external recognizability of advertorials as commercial texts, for example, the presence/absence of labelling, the type size of the label, its typeface, title and sponsorship information (e.g. Armstrong et al., 1980; Cameron et al., 1996; Cameron and Ju-Pak, 2000; Foxall and Goldsmith, 1994), and the effect of advertorials on readers; in particular, confusion among readers who think that advertorials are part of the publication’s editorial content (Balasubramanian, 1994; Cameron and Curtin, 1995; Cameron et al., 1996). Advertorials have become accepted because advertisers are convinced that an editorial format can be more effective than the traditional advertising format in influencing audiences for commercial benefit (Cameron, 1994; Cameron and Haley, 1992), because, with the appearance of ‘news’, an advocacy message is legitimized by third-party credibility – the implicit approval of the medium in which the information is presented (Cameron, 1994; Salmon et al., 1985). The existing research has focused on the role of advertisers in the promotion of advertorials, whereas the role of news producers has been ignored. The existing research is based on the premise that readers can recognize an advertorial by at least one external characteristic, but in recent years, media scientists in Slovenia (e.g. Splichal, 2002), Scandinavia (e.g. Vuokko, 1996) and the USA (e.g. Balasubramanian, 1994; Wilkinson and Hausknecht, 1995), the Slovene Association of Journalists (2003) and the Slovenian Advertising Chamber (2002), as well as journalists themselves (e.g. Dekleva Humar, 2001), have called attention to the illegal practice1 of publishing paid-for commercial texts in the form of news which cannot be recognized as advertorials. For the sake of conceptual clarity, I introduce a new term ‘promotional news’ for all those texts that have been paid for, have been published in the form of news, and that seek to influence audiences for commercial benefit. But how do we discover and analyse such texts? For this purpose, the present study combines analysis of the processes of promotional news production, to identify such texts and uncover elements of promotional practice within journalism, with text analysis to uncover discursive elements of promotion that are overtly drawn upon within news discourse. This study adheres to the analytic paradigm of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) described by Fairclough (1992, 1995a, 1995b), who suggests that the analysis of media discourse should be multidimensional: texts must be related to the discourse practice and to the social practice of which they are part. In this study, I combine text analysis with an analysis of discourse processes incorporating, at the same time, ethnographic methods. The main aim of this article is to 554 Discourse & Society 15(5) © 2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 11, 2008 http://das.sagepub.com Downloaded from present an example of a study which – through analyses of discursive practice and the text – uncovers discursive elements of promotion that are overtly drawn upon within news discourse, thus giving newspaper readers the mechanisms for recognizing this illegitimate hybrid type of discourse. An expansion of the concept of Critical Discourse Analysis The approach to discourse analysis followed in this article draws on Fairclough’s CDA (1989, 1992, 1995a, 1995b), whereby discourse is defined as a linguistic/ semiotic construction of one social practice from particular perspective within another social practice (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999). Fairclough (1989, 1992, 1995a, 1995b) claims that each discursive event2 has three dimensions or facets: (i) it is a spoken or written language text, (ii) it is an instance of discursive practice involving the production and interpretation of text, and (iii) it is a piece of social practice. The analysis of discourse as a text is a form-and-meaning analysis, which includes analyses of generic structure, text dialogic organization, cohesive relations between sentences and relations between clauses in complex sentences, the grammar of the clause and vocabulary. The analysis of discourse as a discursive practice involves the processes of text production, distribution and interpretation (or consumption). There are specifically ‘sociocognitive’ dimensions of text production and interpretation, which centre upon the interplay between the members’ resources that discourse participants have internalized and bring with them to text processing, and the text itself, as a set of ‘traces’ of the production process, or a set of ‘cues’ for the interpretation process (Fairclough, 1992). The analysis involves both the detailed moment-by-moment explication of how participants produce and interpret texts and an analysis that focuses upon the relationship of the discursive event to the order of discourse,3 and upon the question of which discursive practices are being drawn upon and in what combination. The distribution, how texts circulate within orders of discourse, can be investigated in terms of ‘chain relationships’ within orders of discourse. The analysis of discourse as social practice involves social conditions, which can be specified as social conditions of production and social conditions of interpretation. These social conditions relate to three different levels of social organization: (i) the level of social situation, (ii) the level of social institution, and (iii) the level of society as a whole (Fairclough, 1992, 1995b). Because Fairclough’s concept of the analysis of discursive practice focuses on the features of the text, but ‘discourse refers to the whole process of social interaction of which a text is just a part’ (Fairclough, 1989: 13), I expand the dimension of discourse practice to discourse processes, i.e. the process of production, of which the text is a product, and the process of interpretation, for which the text is a resource. Thus, text analysis is only one part of discourse analysis, which also incorporates an analysis of the production and interpretation processes. With the help of findings from news production studies, Van Dijk (1988) has shown that Erjavec: Hybrid discourse 555 © 2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 11, 2008 http://das.sagepub.com Downloaded from the process of production interlocks with a news text. For example, the processes of production are a function of the structure source texts, but they also depend on the structural plans that underlie the news text to be written by the journalist. However, approaches highlighting the role of the reader – reception studies – mostly connect reception with production and the text. For example, for Barthes (1964), interpretation is shaped by the individual’s set of decoding practices, which act as ‘shifters’ favouring one path of interpretation over other possible paths. The producer has a hand in what these paths of possible interpretation will be, and has an interest (as well as a set of strategies) in ‘overcoding’ a particular path of interpretation and ‘undercoding’ others. Thus, the interpretation of a text is closely linked to its production. Because the processes (of production and interpretation) and the structure (of the text) are integrated and mutually dependent properties of discourse, a text analysis should be combined with analysis of the discourse processes. Within the analysis of discourse processes, chain relationships between participants in the discourse processes could also be analysed: what sort of relationships are there between participants in the processes of the production and interpretation of texts. The best way to come to know the processes of text production and interpretation is ethnography (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983; Hansen et al., 1998); this was also recognized by Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), because ethnography requires the systematic presence of researchers in the contexts of the practice studied and can therefore establish precisely the sort of knowledge that CDA often extrapolates from the text, that is, knowledge about the different moments of a social practice: its material aspect (e.g. location arrangements in space), its social relationships and processes, as well as the beliefs, values and desires of its participants. Ethnography can illuminate multiple aspects of a practice, both synchronically (at the time of the fieldwork) and historically, and it also provides an invaluable context for assessing the articulatory process in the practice and the specific function of discourse in it. The usefulness of ethnographic methods for CDA has also been proven by Eriksson (2002) with an analysis of television’s text production and reception, which showed that television plays a crucial role in the reproduction of political discourse. For the purpose of analysing promotional news, we need to define some concepts that enable the identification of elements of other types of discourse which are overtly drawn upon within the discourse. Fairclough (1992) adopts French discourse analysts and defines intertextuality as a case in which specific other texts are overtly drawn upon within a text (e.g. parts of other texts are incorporated into news reports with devices such as quotation marks and reporting clauses), whereas interdiscursivity is a matter of how a discourse type is constituted through a combination of elements of orders of discourse. The concept of interdiscursivity focuses on discourse conventions rather than on other texts as constitutive. An example of interdiscursivity would be ‘mixed genres’ which combine elements of two or more genres, such as ‘chat’ in television chat shows, which is part entertainment and part performance (Fairclough, 1992). 556 Discourse & Society 15(5) © 2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 11, 2008 http://das.sagepub.com Downloaded from In the dimension of discourse practice, I introduce – in addition to interdiscursivity – the concept of interpractice, which identifies cases in which specific other practices in the process of text production and interpretation are overtly drawn upon within a practice. For example, in the process of news discourse production, the news producer (journalist, editor) decides on and produces the news. If an advertiser who orders and pays for news writing makes a decision in the news producer’s place, interpractice occurs: a hybrid practice consisting of journalistic/ editorial and advertising practice. By contrast, in the process of interpretation, interpractice occurs when the reader believes that he/she is reading the news, whereas in reality he/she is reading advertisements. For the above-mentioned reasons, ethnography is suitable for the study of interpractice. The usefulness of ethnographic methods, such as participant observation and interviews, has clearly been shown by different news production studies or the so-called ‘sociology of news’ (Fishman, 1980; Gans, 1979; Golding and Elliot, 1979; Helland, 1993; Schlesinger, 1987; Tuchman, 1978). These studies have also shown that the journalistic process of text production is, to a large extent, a routine practice. The meaning of a text – the ideational and interpersonal functions – is the result of the process of text production. In this process, journalists use an established form and habitual methods to manage production. There are more or less routine and institutionalized ways to do the work, which, of course, have consequences for what could be expressed in the text, and how it could be expressed; it has a consequence for how commercial messages are formed as news. My aim is to combine these insights into a multidimensional approach for the study of promotional news; an approach that considers the structure as well as the processes, and also considers production, interpretation and the text as interdependent and overlapping ‘moments’ of the communication process. In order to be able to identify and analyse promotional news items, research is carried out according to a chronological plan. In the first step, I analyse a new discursive practice and through the analysis collect a corpus of promotional news items, in which discursive elements of promotion are identified using a text analysis in the second step. Although I do not treat reception in the traditional sense of studying audience reception, I hope to employ the sensitivity of the reception paradigm to uncover the promotional news producers’ responses to promotional news practice. Analysis of promotional news discourse INTERPRACTICE: ANALYSIS OF PROMOTIONAL JOURNALISM The data were collected using two methods of field research: participant observation and in-depth interviews. Over a period of 12 weeks in 2002, I spent 140 hours distributed approximately equally among the offices of all four quality daily newspapers in Slovenia. I participated in, and observed the news production activities in the commercial sector of the newspapers and in all the editorial Erjavec: Hybrid discourse 557 © 2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 11, 2008 http://das.sagepub.com Downloaded from departments except the foreign policy ones. My goal was to immerse myself in the world of promotional news production and to provide an adequately ‘thick’ description of the ‘informal logic of the actual life’ of promotional news producers (Geertz, 1973: 17). Carrying out the in-depth interviews was necessary because of the problematic character of the subject of the analysis, as the producers of promotional news items were aware that the practice is illegal and tried to conceal it. Thus, the use of in-depth interviews was, above all, intended to check the data gained by participant observation and add to it, whereas the secondary goal was to obtain the participants’ responses to promotional news practice. I conducted an in-depth interview with each of the main participants actively involved in the production of promotional news (four journalists, four editors, four marketing agents and four advertisers)4 from each newspaper. Interviewees were between 28 and 45 years old, and all but two journalists and two advertisers were men. Because they spoke only on the condition that complete anonymity would be guaranteed, I labelled them using letters, and any words that might identify them were omitted and replaced by ellipses. In the first step of the research, my aim was to uncover the elements of promotional practice, which pays to publish texts for commercial benefit and is overtly drawn upon within journalistic practice, and to identify promotional news for the text analysis. The results are presented in the three stages of news production – information gathering, writing and editing – which are often intertwined. Information gathering The communication process with an order to publish a certain text (which is later paid for) or with blackmail, threatening that an advertising contract will be terminated unless a text is published, is initiated by the advertiser. There are two actors appearing in the role of the advertiser paying to publish a message (Cohen, 1988): an advertising agency in charge of communicating with the media for an organization, or the marketing or public relations sector within the same organization. The advertisers have two key goals: to gain favourable publicity for the organization among readers and/or to achieve the identification of a new or improved product or service among readers. Marketing guru, Philip Kotler (1984), attributes creating favourable publicity for an organization to public relations activities, while he credits advertising with the identification of a new or improved product or service; both practices are promotional. Promotion can be considered as a process whereby ‘favourable information’ (Wernick, 1991) about the organization, its product or services is encoded into promotional messages/ texts (e.g. press releases, advertisements), which lead the customer to buy the product or use the service (Chaston, 1999; Kotler, 1984; Ray, 1982). For the purpose of the present analysis, promotional discourse is defined as the process of the linguistic construction of texts, depicting the subject in question in a favourable light to influence the audience for commercial benefit.5 The interpractice of promotional practice, which is drawn upon within journalism, is referred to as promotional journalism, and its product is referred to as promotional news, 558 Discourse & Society 15(5) © 2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution. at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on April 11, 2008 http://das.sagepub.com Downloaded from the whole discourse process and all the products are labelled a new hybrid discursive type: promotional news discourse. The link between the advertisers and the editors/journalists is the newspaper marketing sector with its marketing agents, who consider promotional news as advertisements, therefore directing their production in the newspaper. For financial reasons they put the interests of the advertisers before those of the news producers. Their response to promotional journalism is positive, because it benefits everyone: journalists by giving them a better income and working conditions, owners and management with the financial benefits, advertisers with new possibilities for advertising, and readers with the better quality of the newspaper (colour, better quality paper, more information). Marketing agents consider the publishing of promotional news to be a reward for large and loyal advertisers and bait for future advertisers. Promotional news is market goods with a well-known price, equal to triple the price of an advertisement the same length. Furthermore, the marketing agent ‘demands cooperation from the editor,’ Editor B claimed, or ‘asks the editor for help,’ his colleague said (Marketing Agent B). This difference in the description of their relationship (demands cooperation versus asks for help) indicates a difference in the perception of this relationship and in the practice itself. Most editors disapproved of this practice and described demands to publish ‘hidden advertisements’ or ‘paid news’, as they are called, as marketing logic intruding into journalism. In every-day practice editors reacted in three ways: (i) those in a strong position refused to carry out promotional journalism in their editorial department, arguing that it is unethical; (ii) some pretended not to see the practice and placed the responsibility on individual journalists, saying that they should decide whether to take part in this practice; and (iii) others allowed the practice to go ahead despite disapproving because of pressure from the marketing sector and management, mostly to ensure the financial stability of the newspaper. In just over half of the editorial departments analysed,6 marketing agents asked journalists to cover certain ‘events’ following more or less clear approval from the editors. Because the decision as to which journalist writes promotional news depends on the orientation of the individual editorial department, there is no uniform pattern in promotional news writers. The responses of the journalists responding to promotional journalism varied a great deal: (i) disapproval and refusing to participate in this practice because it is unethical; (ii) disapproval of the practice, but still participating in it, mostly to ensure the financial stability of the newspaper; (iii) an attitude of indifference (writing promotional news does not seem wrong); (iv) accepting the practice as normal (writing promotional news is accepted as part of the job); (v) the practice is very popular, because they are paid the same amount of money for doing less work (they volunteer to participate in promotional journalism).