No short-term payday for Oprah and Deadspin from Lance, Te’o trainwrecks

Jeff John Roberts — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 00:17:17 +0000

Two media veterans, Oprah Winfrey and Gawker Media’s Deadspin, had the chance to hit online advertising gold this week as record numbers of people came to their websites for tales of tarnished athletes. They came up short, however, and showed — again — how the ad industry is not ready for big moments on the web.

In the case of Oprah, her flub came Thursday night when she aired the confessions of disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong. The interview was broadcast on her OWN cable network but also on the OWN website where blank silence filled the spaces where ads should have been. Media experts took to Twitter in surprise:

Remind me again: why are they not showing ads in the OWN online livestream? God forbid people watch ads for once?

— Rafat Ali (@rafat) January 18, 2013

kind of concerned, it wasn’t just one pod – it’s all the “commercial” breaks. dead air. OWNTV online needs sales help.ownspecial.oprah.com/lancearmstrong…

— Lora Kolodny (@lorakolodny) January 18, 2013

New York Times reporter Brian Stelter suggested the absence of ads could be tied to technical or licensing issues, while paidContent founder Rafat Ali concluded the reason was simply “incompetence.” Whatever the reason, it does appear that Oprah and her struggling OWNTV brand left a big pile of money on the table by playing a major scoop without ads. OWNTV did not respond to a request for comment.

Sports site Deadspin also experienced ad issues this week after it broke the mind-boggling story about how football star Manti Te’o's dead girlfriend — a beautiful Stanford co-ed with “the warm smile and soulful eyes” — was a creature of fiction. As Ad Age reports, the story attracted a record-breaking 3.5 million visitors Thursday night but Deadspin’s parent company, Gawker Media, didn’t have the ad inventory to capitalize on the flood of traffic. The missed opportunity is leading Gawker Media to explore technical solutions, such as a private exchange that lets advertisers bid in real time, for the next time it has a massive story like T’eo or explicit (NSFW) Brett Favre photos.

Internet scoops have been around for a decade, so why are publishers still having such a hard time figuring out the ad equation? Part of it is indeed technical. A massive traffic surge means publishers must match buyers and sellers on very short notice — although, in the case of both Oprah and Deadspin, the nature of the story meant the sites likely had weeks to prepare.

The technical side is one part of the explanation. Another relates to the nature of major news stories which often involve sordid or awful events, creating a risk for both publishers and advertisers — see the bloody t-shirt ad Fox ran during the Newtown shooting. Stephen Roy, a longtime ad man at Edelman who now works for Disqus, explained the situation well in an email to paidContent:

The challenge with monetizing risk-taking journalism is that many advertisers are likely to get squeamish with the association. Advertisers that could have afforded premium rates on Deadspin are also likely to have more brand reputation to lose if somehow the story went awry. They would be asking the advertiser to take the risk with them. And risk drives price down.

The good news for Deadspin, says Roy, is that the site may not be able to cash in right away on stories like the one about T’eo’s fake girlfriend, but that these stories increase the prestige of the publication which make it easier to sell ads in the future.

(Image by Fer Gregory via Shutterstock)

Young women are (still) the best internet bait and 5 other lessons from ESPN’s blogger scandal

Jeff John Roberts — Sun, 06 May 2012 13:30:26 +0000

Sports media was in a lather this week over Sarah Phillips, a 22-year-old ESPN writer who blogged, tweeted and scammed her way to online infamy.

The episode offers some intriguing lessons about digital journalism and social media. We offer some observations below, but first here is a quick recap of the story itself:

This week, sports site Deadspin began raising questions about whether a fetching young woman who writes ESPN’s “Junk Mail” column was pulling a series of internet scams.

Deadspin reported how Phillips, who got her start posing as a gambling addict for betting site Covers.com, has left a trail of sketchy behavior like:

Using her ESPN position to persuade a 19-year-old college student to hand over the password for his website, and then stealing the site

Posting fake photos of herself for biography pictures, including one that appears on a site called “Hot Chicks with Douchebags“

Defrauding a Covers.com reader and then extorting more money from him, and then threatening him with a beating at the hands of the LAPD

This week, ESPN fired Phillips while Deadspin uncovered a steady drip-drip of new details about her scams, lies and rise to minor internet sports personality:

People who knew Phillips say she knew or cared little about sports or betting; the posts that vaulted her to prominence appear to have been written – or at least informed by – a puppet master named Nilesh Prasad

Phillips and Prasad have reportedly been pulling scams for years — including on their one-time employer T-Mobile

Phillips used fake Twitter accounts and other tools to exaggerate her following and influence

The week ended with ESPN backing far, far away while Phillips has issued a conniving, self-serving Twitter explanation.

The episode could provide grist for a whole semester of media, ethics and gender study courses. But in the meantime, here’s some quick takeaways:

1. Young women are gold for an internet scam.

Forget Nigerian princes. A young woman’s photo will always be the best bait to launch an internet scam. In this case, puppet-master Prasad used Phillips to create the persona of a beautiful, sports-loving girl with a gambling wild side — a male fantasy in other words. She became a variation of the mysterious women on Facebook who befriend CEO’s in order to siphon their personal profiles or whose faces are used for a Twitter bot. (This is no reflection on women themselves but rather on the vanity and stupidity of men.)

2. Deadspin hit it out of the park

Deadspin is best known as another blog in Nick Denton’s Gawker empire. Its reporting on this story was as thorough and satisfying as a New Yorker or Vanity Fair feature.

3. The intern economy is corroding journalism

The Huffington Post and others are panting over whether ESPN should have been more diligent in screening Phillips. Yes, probably. But there is also the problem of media outlets relying evermore on interns and freelancers for cheap copy without providing guidance and mentoring in return. There can be bad apples at any outlet (hey there, New York Times and New Republic) but there are bound to be more of them in this environment.

4. Social media is giving rise to new forms of media fraud

In the past, you could only plagiarize or embellish a resume. Now, you can fabricate legions of friends and fans too. Digital Trends has a good account of how Phillips used tools to juice her Twitter account and increase her apparent influence.

5. Women occupy an uncomfortable place in sports journalism

While women are now part of the mainstream in every area of journalism, this is not true in sports. Both media companies and the public have unresolved baggage about how women fit into sports media. This won’t help.

6. Something is rotten at ESPN

ESPN’s response to the story has been underwhelming so far. After ESPN initially brushed the episode aside, VP and executive editor John Walsh addressed it in a live chat. Unfortunately, the answer appears to have come in response to a planted question. The sports network doesn’t have to be a paragon of media ethics. But barely two months after “Chink in the Armor,” it needs to do better than this.

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No short-term payday for Oprah and Deadspin from Lance, Te’o trainwrecks

Young women are (still) the best internet bait and 5 other lessons from ESPN’s blogger scandal