Integrity at the Scripps Howard News Service

by Brian Smith, on May 17th, 2006

Helen Malani, Shopzilla’s chief shopping expert, writes good articles for the Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS). Those articles are often picked up by papers like the Rocky Mountain News and the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. EW Scripps happens to own Shopzilla, the SHNS, and the Rocky Mountain News. Knight Ridder, a competing media company, owns the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.

A couple readers pointed out that Helen’s peices were accompanied by a less than transparent tagline in most newspapers, so I investigated. The first article I found was published in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette where the byline was ‘Shopzilla’ but no tagline was provided further identifying Helen. The article was basically an introduction on what to think about when buying a flat screen TV. Good stuff. However, the last 2 sentences of the article threw me:

After you have found your perfect flat panel TV, consider using an online shopping search engine like Shopzilla (www.shopzilla.com) to find the best price available. The money you’ll save can be used for the necessary cables and other accessories for your new TV.

I’m the first to admit that I know almost nothing about journalism, but as a critical thinker, I was shocked. In my opinion (everything on ComparisonEngines.com is my opinion, but you’ll see why this is important later on), this was a piece about Shopzilla with a purpose to drive readers to Shopzilla to shop. Is there any journalistic integrity down there in Fort Wayne? What happened to separation of marketing and editorial? While the content is good and provides quality information to readers, it turned into nothing more than an advertisement with that last line. At the same time, what a coup for Shopzilla? Write an article about TVs and get free advertising to 34,000 people (Knight Ridder numbers for Fort Wayne News-Sentinel).

I’m having a little trouble accepting this, but as The Journal Gazette is not a Scripps paper, I move onto The Rocky Mountain News to see how a Scripps owned paper is handling a piece (I can’t call it an article anymore) by someone who works at another Scripps company.

I find an April 27, 2006 piece from the Rocky Mountain News about ‘adding zest’ to a bridal shower. Helen’s piece is good. If I were throwing a bridal shower, I’d be excited to find this story. While the piece seems to selflessly mention the Crate & Barrel wedding registry, Crate & Barrel happens to be an advertiser on Shopzilla. Ok, that’s going to happen…what catches my eye is the mention of a Shopzilla study:

Among 3,372 respondents to a Shopzilla survey, the two most frequently mentioned themes were kitchen and lingerie showers.

and more importantly, the tagline which reads:

“Helen Malani is the chief shopping expert for shopzilla.com.”

This screams out to me as a horrible editorial choice. Even though this article is not as blatant as the previous one in terms of telling people to shop at Shopzilla, The Rocky Mountain News, should be more transparent with ownership information. The Rocky Mountain News needs to say, ‘Shopzilla is owned by EW Scripps, which also owns this paper. 99.4% of the public is not going to care, but without an expanded tagline, I lose all faith in The Rocky Mountain News as a credible source of news.


In my experience, when the Wall Street Journal writes an article about another Dow Jones Company, like Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal mentions that it’s a ’sister’ company in some way. When CNBC talks about GE, CNBC mentions that ‘GE is the owner of this network’. I’m sure this doesn’t always happen perfectly…maybe being transparent is the exception rather than the rule (does Time Magazine mention that DC Comics is owned by Time Warner, the parent company of Time Magazine, when it writes about the upcoming Superman Returns movie?), but I still had an issue considering that it was the SHNS putting the pieces out there for distribution with the tagline:

Helen Malani is the chief shopping expert for shopzilla.com, the largest comparison shopping search engine on the Web.

So I contacted Helen Malani who put me in touch with Peter Copeland, Editor & Managing Director of the Scripps Howard News Service.

Here is the email exchange: My email to Helen, Peter’s response, my follow up

From: Brian A. Smith
Sent: Monday, May 08, 2006 11:05 AM
To: Helen Malani
Subject: Shopzilla/Scripps releases

Helen,

I just realized that the press releases you write are now being picked
up as articles on Scripps’ newspapers.

While the articles state “Helen Malani is the chief shopping expert for
shopzilla.com, the largest comparison shopping search engine on the
Web”, they don’t say that Shopzilla is a part of the Scripps network.

I’m not a journalist, so I don’t know what’s standard, but this seems
like a bad choice. Readers should be informed that Shopzilla is a
Scripps company.

Just wondering why you guys decided not to say that Scripps owns
Shopzilla. Looking for an ‘on the record’ comment if possible. Feel
free to call me if it’s easier.
Thanks.

-brian

—
“Copeland, Peter”

Dear Brian: I asked Helen to let me respond to your good question. Our
credibility is something we take seriously and work hard to protect.
Last year, I asked Helen to write a column for Scripps Howard News
Service. Newspaper readers are very interested in shopping, and
Shopzilla is a company that knows a lot about the topic.
The column is not about Shopzilla but about shopping, written by an
expert in the field. Newspapers value the column because it is smart,
well-written and informative.

Scripps Howard News Service and Shopzilla are part of the E.W. Scripps
Company. We make this clear on our site, www.shns.com, and in all of our
promotional material, press releases, etc. In fact, one of the strengths
of our news service is the content from our Scripps properties:
newspapers, cable television networks, and now Shopzilla. We sell our
service to newspapers as the exclusive source of Scripps content from
all media about many topics, including shopping.

I understand your question, though, and we are very careful when we
write about other parts of Scripps, including Shopzilla. Our policy in
news stories about Scripps (or about Shopzilla) is to remind readers of
the shared ownership. In company press releases or news stories about
our own company, we are careful to explain the ownership.

At each newspaper, editors decide how to attribute material from wire
services like ours. Our contributors are many and varied, ranging from
newspapers to bankrate.com to Yahoo! News and magazines. Some are owned
by Scripps and others are not.

Your question has prompted another round of discussion at the news
service about how we should attribute material from columnists, and I
appreciate it.

Let me know if you have further questions.
Yours,
Peter Copeland
Editor & General Manager
Scripps Howard News Service

—
Peter,

Thank you for your thoughtful response to my inquiry. I appreciate the
synergies between the Scripps properties and am excited that Shopzilla
can leverage the SHNS.

However, I disagree with your point that the articles are not about
Shopzilla. If Helen couldn’t mention Shopzilla, would she still be
writing the articles? I think the answer is no…and therefore I
believe that the point of the articles is to tell people about the
benefits of Shopzilla.

Because of this, I think it hurts your credibility (and Shopzilla’s
credibility) only saying “Helen Malani is the chief shopping expert for
shopzilla.com, the largest comparison shopping search engine on the Web”
and not saying that the Rocky Mountain News (for example) and Shopzilla
are both owned by Scripps.

While I’m sure most people don’t care, as a critical thinker, this
blurring of the lines between Shopzilla advertising and news doesn’t sit
well. I’m glad that my email prompted another round of discussions at
the news service.

I’m planning to write a piece about this for ComparisonEngines.com. Can
I treat your email below as an ‘on the record’ statement?

Thanks.

-brian

Over simplifying things, to sum up, I think the pieces Helen writes are about Shopzilla. Peter disagrees. We both maintain our positions, but after talking over the phone and discussing more with his team, Peter changed the tagline of the articles to read:

Helen Malani is the chief shopping expert for Shopzilla.com, an E.W. Scripps company and the largest comparison shopping search engine on the Web. For more columns visit www.scrippsnews.com.

When I asked him why he changed the tagline, Peter said “because you [Brian] saw something that we were doing in a way that wasn’t our intention. From where I sit, I’m all about editorial quality. We have a huge marketing department, but I don’t work with them. What we were doing gave you the impression that we were trying to slip in a marketing message. That’s not the intent.”

While it’s up to the individual Scripps papers to figure out what to carry as a tagline, this new message has been communicated to all the editors. As for other media companies like Knight Ridder, most papers just take what the SHNS gives them, so it shouldn’t be as much of a problem going forward.

In the end, I spent a really long time thinking about this issue. While I’m not a journalist, I do believe in some form of journalistic integrity, and in a blogosphere of questionable sources of information, I feel I have a serious responsibility to provide objective coverage to my audience. That’s why you don’t see Google AdSense or Yahoo! Publisher Network ads on this site…I don’t want to bias my coverage of Froogle or Yahoo! Shopping because of advertising relationships. At the same time, we all have conflicts of interest…I just hope to present these conflicts to my audience as clearly as possible.

I want to thank Peter Copeland for taking my inquiry seriously. I’m very impressed that within a week, he changed Helen’s tagline on all Scripps Howard News Service articles to reflect that Shopzilla is an EW Scripps company. Sure, in the end, it’s just a couple words, but it speaks volumes to the credibility of Peter’s organization.

Related Posts:
Snoopy, Shopzilla, and EW Scripps Company - March 21, 2006

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ZF said

Or their lack of credibility!

It could hardly be more obvious that if you hadn’t called them on it, or even had you called them on it as a simple member of the public and not made plain your intention to blog about it, they would still be doing the same things, for exactly the reasons you identify.

“If Helen couldn’t mention Shopzilla, would she still be writing the articles?” was a great question; boy they must have squirmed when they saw that because any answer in the negative can’t pass the laugh test. I’m all in favor of being generous about others’ motives, but you caught them red-handed here.

“What we were doing gave you the impression that we were trying to slip in a marketing message. That’s not the intent.” That’s a classic. There’s a great story in France about Jacques Chirac. Asked to explain what he is like, someone who had known him for years said that you had to understand that Chirac could look at you with an open jar of jam in one hand, a spoon in the other, and jam smeared all aruond his mouth, and swear on his mother’s life that he doesn’t like jam and never eats it.

May 17th, 2006 at 9:05 pm |

Brian Smith said

You really think SHNS changed the tagline because I’m a blogger? Come on, I’m not that influential. Also, to your point of the articles being or not being about Shopzilla. Is this article from Tuesday, May 16 about Shopzilla?

Another point…why not use your real name?

May 17th, 2006 at 9:17 pm |

Niki Scevak said

Mate, you have only just scratched the surface here and in some ways it’s unfair to call out Helen and Scripps, as it does seem like a minor offence. I am sure if she put a self-deprecating “I may be biased” or “for obvious reason I think you should check out…” then it would have further been diluted.

The reality is that newspapers, trade media and any other kind of media have less and less to spend on content. Paper prices are going up by about 10% a year and ad revenue is flat. That means that each year they have to cut a commensurate amount in other departments. They wouldn’t be paying Helen for those articles and she is happy because it helps her build credibility to a mainstream audience.

I feel silly defending a PR person but just feel like pointing out their incentive to do this. And if you look at any trade conference or trade publication (online or print) this is just standard fare.

Also as you point out the quality isn’t that bad. I think another great example of bias not necessarily being mutually exclusive of quality is the Search Engine Strategies shows, who were charged by Danny, Chris and many small consultants (Danny and Chris were consultants to) who still deliver the best conference on search - even though they all work or started work as SEO consultants.

You’ll only get intependent viewpoints in reporting reliably if the topic is applicable to a large and valuable audience.

Conclusion: Independence doesn’t scale :) But that doesn’t mean it has to be low quality or poor reading.

May 18th, 2006 at 6:11 am |

Feedback said

You asked for feedback and seem genuinely surprised that you don’t have more participation on your site. Ok, here goes: when you bite the hand that feeds you with articles like this(and numerous other examples), you provide a massive disincentive for people to get involved.

Most of your articles seem to try to “find the dirt”, whether at Shopzilla/Scripps, Froogle, Shopping.com, et al. Since getting mentioned on comparison engines often means that you will take a shot at our employer, it’s simply not worth it. It’s better to stay under the radar.

Recognize that your audience is a bunch of industry participants that want to learn more about competitive feature sets, new developments, etc. We can get investigative journalism elsewhere, particularly when it means that we might be your next target.

This is genuinely meant as feedback, not criticism, so I hope it’s taken as such. You’ll note, though, that I’m not willing to put my name either. ;-)

May 18th, 2006 at 6:31 am |

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