In light of recent findings that Google's search engine algorithms had been sabotaged by rightwingers to display stories regarding things like Holocaust denial, the company made the decision to remove the results from the rankings, albeit under a lot of pressure from the Observer. One of the ways in which they applied this pressure was through the paper placing an ad at the top of search results for the cost of £289 saying that: 'Six million Jews really did die. These search results are propagating lies. Please take action.' The journalist who brought light to the story, Carole Cadwalladr, stated in her piece on The Guardian that the reason this approach was taken as oppose to other alternatives was because it was done in 'the only language that Google understands: money.' However irony was found in this when this same news piece found its way in a 'four-page "wraparound" advertisement for Google's new Pixel phone.' Readers of this expressed their dismay and disappointment at these 'mixed messages' and clear undermining of the actual values of the Observer. This here clearly displays the separation that there is between both the advertising and editorial departments of newspapers, and even though advertising is good in assisting to actually pay for journalism, it still should never 'sway the independence of the editorial team and its output.' Funnily enough though in this case, the editor was aware that the wraparound was booked but with Google not being deterred from advertising, he also wasn't deterred from putting a story criticising them in that same issue.
With the notion that advertising has a 'disruptive nature' to newspapers in terms of things like flow and the killing impact it has to the front page of a publication, it is viewed something that 'should be expected rarely.' However, in a time when newspaper revenue is dipping and advertisers are becoming more demanding of what they require, a predicament shows itself where the industry can choose to succumb to commercial pressures or not. These pressures are not helped at all by the fact that newspaper websites too are seeing advertising growth slowing down since revenue is now being siphoned off from news producers by none other than the digital giants themselves, Facebook and Google.
- In 2014-15, global newspaper circulation revenues overtook advertising revenues for the first time, with the 2016 World Press Trends report showing that $90bn (53% of revenue) came from print and digital circulation, compared with $78bn from advertising
I found this article particularly interesting as it brought up the irony that can be found within the journalism industry. Newspapers can often end up taking advertising from companies which they themselves criticise and put under fire. It almost seems the case that things will have to continue being this way too since at this point in time, newspapers need all the money that they can get. While they want advertising to only be accepted here and there, it'll probably be something that occupies increasingly more pages down the line.
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