Timothy,
the only way i could/can accept “advertorials” is if they are CLEARLY marked as “PR”. Everything else is just bad journalism and will finally end in noboy taking these “magazines” seriously, because they will be is brochures. Journalims is really something completely different.
Special Interest magazines will all ruin themselves by beeing so short sighted. The Publsihing house i worked for for many years als published “FOTOMAGAZIN”, and really, that magazine today is WORSE and less inrformative than most brochures on photography. Each and every camera they test gets 4 or 5 stars, while in reality 75 percents of all cameras should get one or two stars the most. I have completely stopped buying any special interest magazines.
Of the Flight Magazines the only ones I can take serious are “AOPA Pilot” and “FLYING”. Flying is actually big and rich enough to be somehwat independent.
Markus,
If you have someone who fills that space and pays for it, it is a win-win for both.
That’s only true if all you care about is MONEY. No real newspaper or magazine will go this way, because they know that it is the end of journalism.
But of course I know that the owner of the publishing houses (i know one lady, she inherited the company and likes fur coats) put a lot of pressure on their editorial staff. I have seen it first hand. Sometimes they do it, becasue they want to survive, most times they do ot, becasue they want to grow and give a f*** about journalism.
Absolutely! Negative stuff must be written about.
However, negative stuff should be well researched, unbiased, fair, opposing view points mentioned, link bait should be avoided, as well jumping too quickly to conclusion. Sources should be mentioned, generalization avoided. Anecdotes should not be pictured as facts.
Flyer59,
I think that any connection between advertorial and journalism is unhelpful. They are different but both have their place. Just like great literature and airport books each have their place. Chekov is great, but Jeffrey Archer sells more.
And anyway, if we were to put advertorial and journalistic standards in a boxing ring it is far from clear who would come out unbloodied. I have seen gutter journalists in action. They have no standards, no decency, no morals and certainly no interest in the truth.
negative stuff should be…
All very true. But why limit that to negative reporting?
I think the basic problem in printed magazine journalism is that the resources are shrinking. The internet has massively undermined the whole business. The mags are 1/2 or 1/3 the size they were 20 years ago. Writing an A4 page article which is informative etc takes a few hours especially if you put in diagrams. And that assumes you have managed to dig out a worthwhile topic – itself that can be very difficult to do every month, month after month… So it is massively tempting to accept advertiser-supplied material. Whether this is ethical or not hangs entirely on whether you disclose the fact. In the mags I get through the letter box, they usually say that the author works for XYZ Ltd, so that little footnote makes it OK. It is many years since these mags had staff writers.
I make a living outside aviation and everything I do in aviation is noncommercial. In that respect I am very fortunate. But even so I’ve had hostility from people in publishing over my peter2000.co.uk site. I guess some of them would like to shut down the internet 
However, negative stuff should be well researched, unbiased, fair, opposing view points mentioned, link bait should be avoided, as well jumping too quickly to conclusion. Sources should be mentioned, generalization avoided. Anecdotes should not be pictured as facts.
Those requirements are for a PhD thesis
What is “link bait”? I googled on the term and cannot relate it to anything on EuroGA. Can you give an actual example from a post here, Lucius?
Link Bait means that an article (or post), has a sensational headline, artfully crafted, to entice the reader to click through, only to disappoint with shallow content. A good example of a web site that is using link bait is Business Insider. However, they are smart enough to sprinkle in good quality articles here and there, so to not completely make the audience abandon the site quickly and forever. The concept appears to work.
The reason, one has to be a little bit more sensitive with regards to negativity is because of the greater harm it can cause. More due diligence is therefore advisable, and an indication of good judgment, albeit not to the extent of a PhD thesis. Just my 2 cents.
has a sensational headline, artfully crafted, to entice the reader to click through,
Surely, every post should have a well chosen topic, indicative of the content. There’s nothing worse than topics like “Is this good?”.
only to disappoint with shallow content
Hopefully not a whole lot of that here…
Peter,
(a little off-topic, but some background why i am so critical about publishers)
the publishing houses were completely ignorant about the internet and they don’t take it serious until TODAY although it will break their necks. And I won’t cry, for sure.
Let me give you an example. I haven written and published 4 books. One of them, a collection of Flying Stories, became quite successful and it has been reprinted 6 times in the last 12 years. That’s maybe one of the things in my work life i am proud about.
Now i wrote two other books for a different publishing house, and it’s one of the biggest publishers in Southern Germany. One is my book about the Moon and the Apollo Missions. When the book first came out in 2009 (for Apollo 11’s 40th anniversary) it got very good reviews everywhere and the first issue (5000) was sold in the next 4 months until Christmas. I think it’s a good book, it took me 14 months of 12 h/day to write it, just because i wanted to write something my son wouldn’t be embarrased about in 20 years :-)
When the 5000 books were sold I was SURE that the publisher would reprint it – but obviously their business plan was different and they didn’t . I called the CEO of the publishing house and i asked her to (at least) make the book a nice eBOOK for the future and she replied: “Uh, yes, that’s a good idea, we really should do that”. They didn’t and later I found out that there was NOBODY in that whole company who knew anything about eBooks. It’s a publishing house that is three blocks big in downtwon Munich. So i asked them to return the rights of the book to me, and they had to, and they did.
I didn’t know much about eBooks either, but i converted the PDF for the book to an amazon-eBook within 3 days and published it myself. With the help of a student and “InDesign” it took me about 10 hours learn all about it and to convert it …. Today the eBook is doing okay , most days it’s among the 5 best selling eBooks about Soace/Astronomy and on many days it’s #1. Not that I make much money with it (between € 100-300/month) but the book will live on and it’s on the market. I wish I had an English vesion of it … it would sell much better in the USA (the publishing house also was not interested in translating it. Professional Book Reviews have called it a very good book and i never got a bad review.
Why should i like publishing houses
Hopefully not a whole lot of that here…
Agreed, this is a great site, and I get a lot of value out of it. Thank you!
