Hybrid media species discovered

Only a scant few months since publishing the first "Field Guide to Common Journalists," Newsvetter's media anthropologists have turned up an exciting new species.

This hitherto undiscovered genus is something of a hybrid, neither fish (journalist) nor fowl (PR rep) by classic definition. Instead, it appears to represent a nascent breed of information professional hired by companies to report their own news.

The name of this particular missing link is Rich Hammond, a veteran hockey writer from the Los Angeles Daily News, who has just been hired by the Los Angeles Kings as a "beat writer/columnist for LAKings.com, the club's official website."

Other sportswriters have been hired by teams in previous years, namely baseball reporters for MLB.com and football writers for specific NFL franchises, and far more have been recruited as traditional publicists. But the Kings specifically cited the "changing world as it relates to the landscape and consumption of sports news content," in their announcement last week. Team spokesman Michael Altieri was more specific, saying in an interview that "there's been declining news coverage of us."

Companies have increasingly begun to create and package their own content to resemble independent news, using PR professionals. This has been an outgrowth of necessity as much as innovation: As news outlets continue to decline, so have the number of reporters to target for story pitches.

But the Kings have taken the concept a step further by hiring a seasoned reporter as a staff "beat writer." It's an idea that makes perfect sense.

A few years ago Mike Sitrick, spin doctor to the stars, explained to Los Angeles magazine why most of his employees were former reporters: "I thought it would be easier to teach journalists what PR is than to teach publicists what journalism is." Sitrick--whose clients include Paris Hilton and Michael Ovitz--was speaking of reporters' ability to manage the news, but it is a logical extension to have them write it as well.

Not surprisingly, the Kings' move has drawn the usual questions about ethics and credibility. But as we've noted many times, commercial media are hardly immune from corporate influence either. And even if they were, how different would Hammond's daily dispatches be from their standard beat reporting?

We suspect that most rabid fans would rather have such information than none at all, regardless of whether it comes from journalists or PR professionals. And considering the latest Pew Research report that credibility of the press is at a 20-year low, we doubt many readers will care who's signing his paychecks as long as they get their fill of stats and injury updates in a timely and accurate manner.

This is not meant to sound Pollyannish; quite the contrary. We don't expect Hammond to break any scandals about the Kings' owners or management anytime soon, despite the promise that "Rich will have full editorial control in his new position."

The simple fact is that much of what appears in mainstream news stories could easily come directly from their subjects and sources--a concept that's central to Newsvetter's philosophy. Even when media outlets were fat and happy, so-called enterprise and investigative reporting represented but a tiny fraction of the general news flow anyway.

The future of that type of journalism may depend on another evolutionary link.