Speaking for Goliath
Amazon, Domino’s, and other up-and-coming news outlets
One of the most powerful corporations on earth got caught lying last week about its workers peeing in bottles.
“You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?” the corporate Twitter account @amazonnews tweeted at Congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin on March 24.
This was a reference to a widely circulated story that the internet retail company pushes its warehouse workers and delivery drivers to skip bathroom breaks in order to meet brutal efficiency standards. The fact was well established in 2018 in multiple mainstream news outlets, as well as one firsthand account by the journalist James Bloodworth who worked undercover as a picker at an Amazon fulfillment center in the UK.
Amazon’s denial failed spectacularly last week. More Amazon workers came forward to confirm the story, including one who told Business Insider she had to change menstrual pads in the back of her delivery van to stay on schedule. Amazon employees started leaking internal memos to journalist Ken Klippenstein at The Intercept revealing that managers were well aware of the phenomenon and Amazon’s “news” account was lying about it. In fact, one May 2020 email chastised drivers for urinating in bottles and even defecating in bags while driving delivery routes during the pandemic.
Amazon is trying to cast itself as the good-guy Goliath in a PR battle against its workers who are fighting for union representation, better working conditions, and the basics of dignity at a fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama. Watching the company’s well-funded propaganda unit fall on its face in the final stretch of the union campaign was gratifying to say the least.
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This is all old news if, like me, you’ve been watching the Bessemer union drive like it’s the most important election of the year. But I thought it was worth examining the episode again through the lens of public relations, journalism, and PR-masquerading-as-journalism.
The Twitter account at the center of the fracas is @amazonnews, which describes itself in its bio as “[t]he official account for news about @Amazon.” Most days the account is classic PR-masquerading-as-journalism, churning out easily digestible profiles and puff pieces about the company’s charitable donations.
On a normal day, the pseudo-journalistic output of @amazonnews coexists peacefully on social media alongside independent journalistic news stories about Amazon. A sleepy local business journal might even replicate one of the puff pieces on a slow news day.
But on March 24, @amazonnews collided with actual Amazon news. The conflict underlined the essentially antagonistic relationship between journalists and PR professionals: One group represents the public interest; the other represents the company’s interests.
One group vastly outnumbers the other, too. Around the turn of the millennium, the United States had 1.9 PR professionals for every 1 journalist, according to U.S. Census data. When I started working as a journalist in 2011, that ratio was 3 to 1. In 2019, the ratio was 6.4 to 1, and more news outlets are closing every week.
So sure, the reporter Ken Klippenstein is a good deal smarter and more resourceful than the PR team at Amazon. But there’s only one of him, and the PR flacks are legion.
Thanks to the online democratization of publishing, companies realized sometime in the last decade that they could simply write their own articles, post them on their own websites, and promote them via social media — no need to pester a journalist for placement in the local news rag. An account like @amazonnews, with a virtually unlimited budget for targeted advertising, can nudge its version of history under readers’ noses pretty easily.
As the PR-to-journalist ratio ballooned, corporations started coming up with weird ideas.
Several up-and-coming companies launched their own boutique news-y publications around the mid-2010s. The Casper mattress company launched Van Winkle’s, a website about sleep and wellness; the Dollar Shave Club created MEL, a men’s lifestyle publication; and Snapchat created a scholarly tech publication called Real Life.
Most of these projects failed, if they ever got off the ground. Van Winkle’s fizzled out in 2017 after just two years; MEL laid off its entire editorial staff last week.
Whatever its impact was on the PR landscape, the brand-backed-lifestyle-publication fad produced some actual journalism along the way. Van Winkle’s once ran a 6,000-word investigation on the links between PTSD and sleep deprivation in the military. MEL employed some talented writers and ran the occasional engrossing deep dive; RIP to a real one.
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Another byproduct of the collapse of the journalism industry has been the proliferation of junk corporate data science masquerading as news. The Domino’s pizza chain generated a little buzz this week when it posted a job listing for a “data journalist,” apparently to prepare internal Powerpoint presentations using data analytics, but other companies have been pinching off public-facing data visualizations for years.
Writing for the Nieman Journalism Lab in 2014, Jacob Harris saw the rise of this trend and predicted a “wave of bullshit data.” He pointed to a few examples that had filtered into traditional news outlets that year:
The nation’s most stressed zipcodes include one near you, as reported by real estate blog Movoto.
Washington residents complain about rats more than New Yorkers, as reported by Orkin.
People sometimes use car-share services after hooking up, thanks to some creepy oversharing from Uber.
To be blunt, all of these stories were unredeemably awful, riddled with errors and faulty assumptions. But accuracy wasn’t the point. All of these examples of “data journalism” were generated by companies looking for coverage from online news organizations. The goal is a viral feedback loop, where the story is reaggregated by others, the site surges in its organic search rankings, and the study is tweeted for days even by haters like myself. For these purposes, they were perfectly designed to exploit the nature of modern news distribution online.
The trend had some staying power. Fast-forward to 2021: Nike is hiring a data journalist, and I’m bombarded by gimmicky WalletHub rankings of my city and state every time I log on to Facebook
In some extreme cases, private companies simply started hiring their own reporters and giving them scoops. Major League Baseball has been doing this since 2009.
Public agencies occasionally catch the PR-masquerading-as-journalism bug, too. The Charleston County School District floated the idea of hiring its own “journalist” to tell “stories of the greatness of our 87 schools and programs” in 2017.
I was the only full-time education reporter in the county at the time, and I’d be lying if I said the opportunity wasn’t tempting: The starting pay and benefits package of $80,000 would have more than doubled my salary. Instead I wrote an article about the proposal, which drew public outcry and was quickly abandoned by the school board.
There is still a sense in which journalists need PR people, and vice versa. PR departments provide official access, which is one tool but not the only tool for newsgathering; and journalists can lend credibility to the proclamations of PR departments by vetting their claims independently.
But no one on earth needs a PR department pretending to be a news outlet. If I’m looking for Amazon news, I’ll look anywhere other than @amazonnews.
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The union voting period for the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer ended Monday; the National Labor Relations Board is counting the ballots now.
In exciting labor news closer to my home, workers at a major South Carolina newsroom are pushing for a union right now. Reporters, photographers, and newsroom producers at The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., went public with the formation of The State News Guild this morning, announcing that they are seeking voluntary recognition from management and the McClatchy Company.
If they succeed, they will be only the second local newsroom in South Carolina to unionize. Last year on the podcast, I interviewed reporters from the first newsroom union down in Beaufort County. All power to the workers, and may the free press never perish from the earth.
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