Is being willfully ignorant a prerequisite for getting a job as a consumer news reporter? A lot of the time, it sure seems so.
Case in point: last week’s coverage of Forrester Research’s forecast that e-mail marketing spending will hit $2 billion by 2014.
The trades all got it right. After all, it was a fairly straightforward reporting assignment on the projected growth of e-mail marketing.
However, with most consumer reporters seemingly having a tourettes-like need to identify all commercial e-mail as spam, it wasn’t entirely surprising that the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe published blurbs implying that Forrester’s forecast was a prediction on the growth of spam.
“There's no end in sight to the scads of spam e-mail infiltrating consumers' inboxes,” led the Wall Street Journal piece filed by its wire service Dow Jones. The rest of the piece shot it pretty straight, but by then the damage had been done.
However, the Boston Globe offered the following gem:
“Crank up those spam filters - because by 2014, consumers will be ‘deluged’ with more than 9,000 e-mail marketing messages annually, predicts Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge.
“Think of it - 9,000 e-mails. Offers from retailers for free shipping. Invitations to join dubious investment schemes. Ads for miracle diets that promise to make geezer Romeos jump and frisk - and lose weight at the same time. Put another way, 9,000 e-mails per year works out to nearly one per hour, 24/7, from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31.”
Oh. My. God. One e-mail per hour. I’m having a panic attack just thinking of handling all those messages. Oh, wait. I already get far more than that.
In any case, the first sentence of the Boston Globe blurb was bad enough. The second was a case of a reporter remaining purposely ignorant of what Forrester’s report was about for the sake of a dishonest angle—and not even an original angle.
Forrester even differentiated between spam and other commercial e-mail on page four of the 10-page report. Think about it, the Boston Globe reporter couldn’t even be bothered to read even the first half of a 10 page report with lots of white space and graphs to make sure he understood the material.
And this was a business reporter.
In order to engage in such dishonest reporting, the writer had to confine his reading to the executive-summary in the blue box in the beginning of Forrester’s forecast. Either that or he read the whole report and purposely ignored the part about spam on page four or was too stupid to understand it—neither scenario reflecting well on him.
Moreover, even in the blue executive-summary box, Forrester stated plain as day that three quarters of e-mail spending will be on retention. Did it occur to Boston-Globe-hack-reporter man to even think about what retention e-mail might be? What did he think those e-mails might be retaining? Water?
The big question is why anyone in the [hopefully mostly] permission-based e-mail marketing industry would even approach these hacks with their news in the first place? The consumer press invariably treats direct marketers as something just short of child molesters and embarrasses the companies mentioned.
A piece of advice to those seeking press: If for some reason you feel you have to try and get publicity in the consumer press, you must go into the deal understanding the reporter probably knows next to nothing about marketing, probably doesn’t like the minuscule understanding he or she has about marketing, and will do a hack job unless you straighten them out up front on what it is you do and why it’s a positive endeavor.
And then don’t be surprised if the piece they file ends up being a hack job anyway.
