Believe it or not, but every interaction I have with readers isn’t always a positive one. One of the most frequent ways in which assholes, jealous types, and idiots express frustration when I draw conclusions they don’t agree with is to accuse me of being paid by the brands I write about, or to suggest that I’m swayed by free gear. Let’s talk about that.
How Journalists Get Paid
My paychecks come from the publications I write stories for. Those publications make money by selling ads to brands. So, does that mean journalists are paid by brands? The simple answer is that wouldn’t work.
Brands buy ads in media rather than simply put information on their own channels for two reasons: 1) to reach more people and 2) to put their message adjacent to objective content. The idea is that they not only reach more eyeballs that way, but also that those eyeballs are more engaged.
If you, a consumer, are interested enough in birds to read a 4,000 word novella about pheasant hunting, then a brand like Garmin figures you might also be the kind of person who might buy a radio collar for your dog. For that to work, you have to have a compelling reason to click on that article, then spend six minutes of your life reading about the economics of industrial farming in the midwest.
That’s to say, for advertising to be effective, it needs run adjacent to content people care about. Everyone involved in making money from advertising is thereby incentivized to participate in the creation of content that effectively engages you. Because most readers are smart, and this is a competitive industry, good content is objective content.
I’ve worn a lot of different hats during my 20-year long career in media. I’m mostly a writer for large titles these days, because that’s what I enjoy doing, but I’ve worked as an editor at five different titles, founded, owned and sold two independent publications; produced ads for an agency; written ad copy; stood in for real models in advertising shoots; been on-screen talent in television commercials; and even done some precision driving for car and motorcycle commercials. I've written for major newspapers, indie fashion mags, blogs, big websites, and everything in between, and done that in both Europe and here in the United States. That’s to say that I’ve seen pretty much every side of this business. At no point in any of that have I ever seen a brand attempt to influence an editorial decision (editorial is the content journalists create, it can sometimes appear alongside advertorial, which is narrative advertising, and obviously alongside ads) with their checkbooks, nor have I seen any publication offer to do that. Again, doing so would simply be counterproductive, making an ad that appeared alongside such content ineffective.
Do brands pay journalists directly, under the table? I’ve never heard of such a thing happening, and am not aware of any mechanism by which such payments could even take place.
The Internet Muddies The Waters
I think one of the reasons why people jump to the conclusion that journalists who create content they don’t agree with must be getting paid is that the Internet has given rise to various social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube, where the business model for power users is expressly to shill for brands. That is not an insult, that is simply a description of how influencer marketing works: they place a box of laxative tea in a photo of their butt in a thong, and the maker of that laxative tea pays per impression. Whether or not that person has performed exhaustive testing of every type of laxative tea to find out which one makes you shit your pants hardest is irrelevant, their business model is product placement.
That’s confusing, because the business model for social media platforms—advertising—incentivizes them to direct as many eyeballs as possible to these influencers. Advertising on social media is sold at rates so low that no publication could make money running them. But, because the user bases of these social media platforms is so vast, they profit. Those low rates attract advertisers looking to save money, which diminishes the amount of money publications end up earning, but that’s a story for another time. What’s relevant here is that those platforms have so much traffic, that publications go fishing for views there too. So you end up seeing real journalism running in the same place as that bethonged butt promoting a laxative tea. And that understandably causes confusion. Is that Wes guy a journalist, or a butt model? I understand why that wouldn’t always be clear. But no, I do not take money from laxative tea brands.
What About The Freebies?
I’ll cut straight to the point on this one: as a reader, you want a person who reviews gear to get free gear. Not because you care about the health of that person’s bank account, but because you want to read about the latest, greatest stuff, and plenty of it.
Let’s use Garmin as an example again, just because I had a nice conversation with a guy there yesterday. They just came out with a new dog tracking device that’s much smaller than the old one, and that offers some new functions. They’re sending me one. If I think it offers a compelling enough benefit to my readers that it justifies the time and effort, I might write it up at some point. Why didn’t I buy it? Well, I already have a dog tracking device that I'm totally happy with, there’s no reason to replace it. But, part of my job is to test new gear. Garmin hopes that, if I write some nice things about this doohickey, they might sell a few of them. If I do write about it, you read, enjoy, and benefit from that article, then one of the reasons for that will be that I didn't have to go buy a thing I didn’t need or want.
Is that a transaction? Is Garmin buying positive content, or any content at all, by sending me this thing? No.
For some reason, this is more understood with car media than it is outdoors stuff, so let’s talk about that for a minute. Do you really think that a road test editor at a car magazine goes out and buys a new car every week? Of course not. Cars are loaned to car journalists by car makers. Does this influence the reviews you read of those cars? The answer involves nuance.
By getting that car from a car maker, rather than buying it, the car journalist is probably getting access to that car before it goes on sale. So you, a car buyer, are reading about it before you start making a purchase decision. You’re served, but obviously there’s also a benefit to the car maker if the review is positive; it enters the market with buzz around it. By loaning that car to the journalist, the brand is also ensuring that the car is a good example—it's on fresh tires, isn’t covered in baby poop, and in good running condition. That means the car maker is getting to put its best foot forward, but it also means the journalist is evaluating all cars on a level playing field. I could go on, but this is already getting long.
Does the journalist achieve some sort of financial benefit from getting a new car delivered to their house every Monday? Are they incentivized to maintain a good relationship with automakers in order to keep that free car train rolling? Would they get fewer cars or less timely access if the automakers were mad at them? All that stuff starts to get complicated, and it's a big part of the job of a product reviewer to negotiate all that and more. Maintaining access to the products you need to write about is vital. Which leads me to my next point.
This Is A Complex Job
When I was a road test editor at Jalopnik, my job wasn’t so much to write car reviews as it was to develop and maintain relationships across the industry, ensuring that we could have good access not just to vehicles, but to the engineers, designers, executives, and other smart people that we needed to talk to all the time to get tips on stories, interview, or whatever. Doing that, I made friends and enemies, some of which I still have today, took an awful lot of free plane rides, at a lot of free steak, and developed a taste for expensive martinis I didn’t have to pay for myself.
And yet I still rose to prominence with my car reviews, and developed a reputation as one of the better writers of them. How can all those complex relationships, free travel, sweet cars, and martinis coexist with good content? Because making them coexist is the express job of a journalist.
Mad about one of my opinions, a reader messaged me a while back with something along the lines of, “You’re hardly Bob Woodward.” I’m not, but not for the reasons he was suggesting. Bob’s job is the same as mine, just in a different industry: politics (yes, I also write about politics). He doesn’t get tips and leaks and insider information because he just happens to stand in the right place when they fall from the sky, he’s spent decades developing the same kind of relationships, eating the same steaks, and drinking the same martinis I do. Do people benefit when Bob writes something? Politics is a business just like any other. The people giving him tips and leaks aren’t doing it for fun, they’re doing it to hurt rivals, get a job, or influence policy. Is Bob navigating complex ethical gray areas? All the time, because that’s the job of a journalist. You read his reporting, or the results of it, about politicians of all shapes, sizes, and colors because Bob is good at this job.
Performative Objectivity
There are, of course, outlets that specifically frame their content within very narrow ethical bounds. The two that come to mind off the top of my head are The Wirecutter and Consumer Reports.
Let’s talk about CR and car journalism. They famously bar their writers from attending launches, accepting any thing that could vaguely be interpreted as a gift, and even buy the cars they review. But, by failing to get hammered with a car designer, thereby developing a lifelong friendship that builds a vast understanding of that field, saying no when someone hands you a hat, and only driving a very narrow selection of vehicles, I think they cause more harm than benefit to the quality of their reporting.
CR may be able to tell you, for instance, that the headlights on the Ranger they bought are shitty. And they are. But because they said no to the chance to drive all different trim levels in order to achieve the appearance of objectivity, they don’t know, and can’t report that’s only true of the lights on the XL and XLT models; the LED headlights on the Lariat fix the problem, but CR readers are unable to get critical information like that.
The Wirecutter’s journalism is similarly performative, while also lacking the kind of experience and perspective that could deliver more effective shopping guidance. Take their camp stove buying guide for instance. I’d like to call it comical that they rank the Coleman as their number one choice, but I can’t, because it's actually dangerous. They’re so notorious for catching fire and injuring people that the brand’s last PR agency was forced to drop them, for fear of killing journalists. I know this because I’m friends with the guy who owned that agency and made that decision. But that kind of insight is prevented from existing in outlets like these.
Ultimately the value in Consumer Reports’s car stuff lies in its tabulation of ownership expenses, and recall information. But, it seems like there’s little need to create original content around numbers like that, when crowd sourced data gives you access to exponentially larger data sets. Websites like Fuelly are a better way to find real world fuel economy. TrueCar is a more complete source of information around total cost of ownership, and owner's forums are a much more informative way to find out what goes wrong, and how to fix it.
Crowd sourcing also offers a better source of more diverse information around gadgets than The Wirecutter. They can’t tell you that Coleman stoves catch fire, but click over to the reviews on Amazon, and you’ll find that in the second review.
Again, a journalist’s job is not to regurgitate information that can be found elsewhere, it’s to provide the kind of real insight only an expert can provide. And to become an expert, you need to immerse yourself in all parts of the field you cover.
Why Not Disclose?
Full Disclosure: one of my longtime readers asked me about this, and pointed out Jalopnik’s humorous disclosures as an example of something I should do. That’s funny, because he’s been reading since I worked there, and it was me who started the system of doing those.
I did that because I knew we needed to attend product launches if we wanted to be competitive with our car reviews, but one of the Gawker executives got a bug up their ass about accepting free travel, even though they were too cheap to cough up the cash for plane tickets. The level of snark involved in the disclosure was intended to express how silly I found it to explain that we’d gone on a plane ride, or eaten a steak, when the reality of the matter wasn’t that any of us cared about one more flight, or another boring meal, when we’d had to spend months, or even years trying to get meetings, building relationships, taking people out for beers, and lying, cheating, and scamming our way to getting a seat on that launch. And we did all that because we genuinely believed there was a need for a fresh take on stodgy old car review.
A real disclosure, today, would look something like this: I borrowed the product I’m reviewing from Chris Brinlee because I’m too disorganized to have called it in in time for the trip I needed it for. It smelled like BO, so I had to wash it before I could use it, and I may have packed it while still slightly damp, judging by the mold now growing on it. I’ve worked with this company for like eight years, and through those meetings and stuff became really good friends with the guy who designed this thing. Hanging out with him as taught me everything I know about outdoor product design. They ended up firing him without cause, right at the beginning of the pandemic, which was really hard on him and his family. But I was able to help him get a better job at another company, so a least there’s that. I think they sent me one for free once, but I probably gave it to Nick, my hunting partner, who dropped it in a river or something. They probably advertise with us, but I don't pay any attention to that. Oh, and they once helped foot the bill for a mountaineering trip on which I brought some edibles. Another journalist ate a handful of them without realizing they were, well, edibles, and ended up clinging to her tent in terror for 12 hours instead of climbing the mountain because she’d never gotten high before, and I guess a ledge on the side of a mountain is a bad time for that. Pretty sure everyone was mad at me about that for a while. They used to work with PR company that employs like half my friends, but now they work with a different one that seems way more competent.
Aside from me being funny, does any of that really matter? I’m going to write about that thing with exactly the same level of professionalism and objectivity that I would anything else, because that’s my job. It doesn’t matter if it’s something I bought, borrowed, stole from Chris (he lives in my guest house, making thievery troublingly easy), my job is to tell you about it in the same way, no matter what. And I’m able to do that pretty well because of all the strange, fascinating experiences all of this gives me.
How To Find Good Journalists
I already said this is getting (very) long, so let’s wrap it up by giving you, dear reader, some actionable advice. Worry less about objectivity, and worry more about perspective and experience.
Take David Tracy’s Rivian R1T review for instance. Turns out that sketchy motherfucker went on a run with one of the Rivian staff. How’s that for ethics in journalism?! And yet, what matters here, is that David was able to use his experience working as an engineer, the relationships he’s built with Rivian’s engineers, and combine them with his significant experience driving off-road and wrenching on his crappy old trucks to actually communicate to you how the R1T’s ultra-complicated four-motor system provides traction off-road.
That is a great example of how great a gear review can be, when it’s put together by a journalist who actually understands the topic he’s writing about. Seek out similar voices in other fields, and you will be similarly well served.
Let’s Talk About Ethics In Gear Reviews (Or, How To Be A More Informed Reader)
At the first OR show after I was hired as gear editor for Rock & Ice magazine (it was still in Reno, you were probably in diapers), I was schooled by the head of PR for Patagonia (blanking on name, she was awesome) on how important my job was to give honest reviews for both readers and brands. With a long background in specialty retail (Neptunes), I had a good insight into the industry and what consumers wanted.
This was a time where I could write a 4,500-word article on carabiners and an opus on climbing ropes. And the industry was smaller and more intimate so I knew a lot of the designers, PR folk, and head muckitymucks at many brands. For about a decade (expanding into Trail Runner, which I founded) my reviews were honest and more comprehensive than typical these days.
I took the job seriously and didn't pull punches. Sounds like fun from the outside but reviewing ten sleeping bags, or a dozen tents, or two dozen climbing shoes gets old after a while. A butt load of boxes, piles of gear everywhere taking up space, figuring out how to make honest real-world comparisons, then sending most of it back because I really don't need it. Yeah I got some really nice press trips and some swag but ultimately it got old.
My reviews did lose advertisers when I didn't praise the product; one a prominent back cover regular. And Dan McHale left a long, ranting phone message because my expedition pack review was so bad that I should "fall in a crevasse and die."
But honest reviews were important to the industry in that era. Today it's mostly pithy crap where they don't do their homework. Wirecutter has really gone pathetic after NYT bought them. Almost none of the Outside media titles are reliable for gear reviews anymore--not because of insider connections, just poor research and writers with limited experience.
Never paid attention to car reviews until I shopped for an SUV a couple years ago. Even there, most mainstream weren't very good (Car & Driver stood out as best) and Youtubers were more important in my buying decision.
Just call me an old curmudgeon who liked reviews that gave readers enough information to make a truly informed buying decision.
Oh man, I'm going to link to this so many times.
I'm not in journalism, but I make purchasing decisions with six-figure budget each year. I'm not going to risk my reputation or career because some sales guy bought me dinner at Applebee's or comped a hotel room.
It's in a journalist's best interest to tell the truth in an interesting way rather than be bought off by brand because that's what draws readers. A consistent paycheck is way better than free gear that you almost certainly didn't need anyway.
Are you already working on an essay about affiliate links?