This campaign calls for tourism boards, the public sector, and stakeholder brands (private sector) to enable their PR agencies and marketing professionals to show respect for journalists in the travel and tourism field, and recognize their contribution to this money making global industry.
The Advocacy Campaign
33 journalists, bloggers, and influencers, 4 PR agencies, and 11 travel and tourism brands joined the just launched World Tourism Network advocacy campaign to bring fairness to “earned media.”
Unless you or your client work for free, please don’t try to push content promoting a business, a destination, an event, or research unless you demonstrate a good faith effort so that our publication can become a part of the earning process – directly or indirectly.
This is the message participating publications relate to those pushing earned media.
How Earned Media works?
Destinations, travel brands, event organizers, research companies that want to increase visibility by news coverage are hiring PR agencies and rely on their promise to get “free coverage” for their mostly self serving promotional press statements.
“We receive close to 2000 press releases on a daily basis, 95% are clear attempt to promote and advertise new hotels, destinations, airline and cruise specials bypassing our commercial options “, said Juergen Steinmetz, publisher of eTurboNews, and Chairman of the World Tourism Network.
Fam Trips
“Sometimes, those who want to be featured host journalists, influencers, or bloggers for a well-meaning and all-inclusive FAM trip. The idea is to soft buy free positive coverage, but unfortunately, this doesn’t pay our bills. Also, the time invested by these journalists takes away from other potential work,” said Steinmetz.
The new WTN advocacy campaign calls for journalists and their publications to be compensated for the time they spend on FAM trips.
Every Trick in the book
Journoresearch seems to have taken the game of enforcing earned media benefits for their clients to a new level.
The so-called Journalists’ Research Department of Journoresearch says they produce stories that audiences love and promise reputable, accurate research, that supports great stories.
They claim to be aligned with brands such as bbc.co.uk, telegraph.co.uk, express.co.uk, msn.com, thesun.co.uk, yahoo.com, standard.co.uk, nasdaq.com, forbes.com, elle.com, bloomberg.com,, what eTN could not verify.
Their self-set goal: We support journalists worldwide with interesting insights and data.
According to them, they explain how this works
- our clients commission us to conduct research in their industry
- We conduct the research and send our findings and insights to relevant journalists
- Journalists use our insights as a base and as an added value for their stories and mention our client in their publication with a link.
What they don’t say is that almost every research is based on sensational information that easily opens the window for complaints and has a high likelihood of creating a reputation issue for publications conducting such research without fact-checking.
To make it even worse, difficult to detect links hidden in the research point to questionable businesses, such as online gambling websites, adult businesses, among others. Most legitimate publications would stay far away from including such links in articles. Including such links may endanger ratings on Google and other search engines.
When a publication does not include such links after publishing such a research story, they will get an email from someone by the name of Anna Ryan. This email will say: Hi, this article (LINK to the article) has used insights and data from my press release without crediting (HER ADVERTISER) who conducted the research. Would it be possible to edit this to credit them and use a link to their site (QUESTIONABLE LINK)
In such an “engaging story,” the company insisted on linking to an online casino company. When looking at the online casino company website, this website often does not include contact information. The reputation of such casino websites often lists numerous complaints by those who claim fraud.
PR Newswire & Cision
Another master in getting PR agencies to use their services is Cision, owner of PR Newswire. One of Cision’s services is selling contact information, including email addresses, of “verified journalists.” PR agencies pay substantial money to use such addresses in good faith.
The PR Newswires business model is to circulate press releases to a large number of publications.
Cision is a company known for spidering publishers’ websites and extracting private, non-used email addresses. eTurboNews had established several email traps with non-used email addresses and made-up names to identify those that spider.
Every day, such email addresses receive hundreds of press releases from PR companies from around the globe that apparently paid money to Cision to obtain such addresses, violating privacy policies.
PR Newswire is charging PR agencies a significant amount of money to circulate press releases to a large number of journalist subscribers. They indicate that their journalists will pick up such releases for stories in their publications.
What they don’t tell their clients:
- Any serious publication concerned about search engine ratings copying such a release for publishing will be penalized by some search engine operators for using “duplicate content.” PR Newswire is directly competing with publications sending releases out once the content is already indexed under their PR Newswire domain.
This indicates to search engines PR Newswire is the first and original source of such content, preventing any publication from getting credit for publishing their stories. Publishing can easily indicate to search engines duplicate content, was is bad for the reputation a publication established after years of work. Whenever PR newswire wants, they can now claim copyright for content they circulated for a fee. - PR Newswire is generating impressive reports with hundreds of pick-ups, when in fact the majority of such statistics are purchased backroom traffic no real reader would ever see. They work with large news sites that need the revenue like everyone else but protect themself by not having such content on pages a regular reader would ever see.
Such media companies include YAHOO FINANCE, AP, and Business Wire, among others. - When Travel Marketing Network used PR Newswire services for a consulting client, the impressive pick up of 123 publications shown in the success report provided, and millions of readers potentially noticing the press release, eTN research narrowed the real data down to 2 publications, and one was eTurboNews.
This World Tourism Network Advocacy campaign is designed to make the relationship between travel brands, PR agencies, and publications more fair and rewarding.
For more information on how to join this campaign go to https://wtn.travel/earnedmedia/
What this means for press releases accepted by eTurboNews click here.
