Even if you buy into Wired’s “Gear” section, a main menu choice on the prestigious publication’s landing page, it’s jarring to see … mattresses. A beefy review article on mattresses. For side sleepers, no less. The situation represents a media and PR paradox.

Wired has a mission statement. Here’s the heart of it: “The Wired conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our lives—from culture to business, science to design.” Metadata and descriptions for its Gear section are titled Tech Gear. But with each passing day the site strays closer into a product free-for-all. And “Gear” is almost all buying guides, despite multiple subsection labels. Scanning Wired on Prime Day felt insane, with 10 of the first 13 “stories” on the landing page selling goods. Rolling Stone might have it even worse. Perhaps deservedly, the once iconic music magazine is now just a shadow of Pitchfork and reduced to hocking air purifiers for pets. 

Other beloved media brands? “Trends + Deals We Love” and “Travel Products” are landing page staples for Travel + Leisure today, where you can read a thousand words on the best men’s water shoes of 2024. Food & Wine’s e-commerce section is bluntly labeled in the main menu WHAT TO BUY, with categories like Cookware, Bar & Drinks, Small Appliances, and Grilling & BBQ. But both of these publications arguably keep their selling more germane to their brand. For now.

The question of whether well-known media brands are selling out their missions, or not, recently inspired vigorous discussion at our proverbial e-watercooler, when Bospar PR maven Kevin Martin shared a provocative excerpt from Anne Helen Petersen’s substack. Her June essay, What Happened to People Magazine?, clobbered 16 companies that own hundreds of media brands, making a compelling case that they are endlessly replicating an e-commerce formula to game Google SEO, in turn diluting their publication brands to mush:

“No publication — at least at Dotdash Meredith — is spared. If you read the post, you’ll see that some of the top SEO chum (for air filters, but also all manner of ‘best’ recommendations) is coming from People.com. All of this is pretty grim shit: the result of executives who understand legacy publications, from Popular Science to Sports Illustrated, solely as vehicles for online ad arbitrage schemes with diminishing returns.”

She also cited HouseFresh founders Gisele Navarro and Danny Ashton who examined how publishing conglomerates:

“… have adopted a private equity model that ‘utilizes public trust in long-standing publications to sell every product under the sun’ via Google SEO optimization. The end result: sites like RealSimple.com and BetterHomesandGardens.com pump out ‘best of’ product recommendation lists to game Google’s search algorithms.”

Our team’s analysis was passionate and varied — and yielded some thoughtful observations on the intersections of journalism with PR, marketing and corporate mandates. 

We were especially fortunate to have award-winning writer and senior commerce editor working with GQ, Kristen Geil, join the conversation. Bospartans included VP of media relations Brent Shelton, senior directors of social media and PR, respectively, Connor Grant and Kevin Martin, me (Racquel) and others.

Here are some key insights from the group —

Advertising changes over time. Content-rich, meaty product reviews may be a net positive.

Brent: 

“Many reviewers and publication outlets do it the right way and are coveted by consumer clients that are devoted to building exceptional products. The reviewers are smart and do their research. There are some bad media models for sure, but many still take product knowledge very seriously.” In May, Brent shared abundant, specific advice in this two-part blog on How PR Pros Approach Product Reviews and Roundups, I & II. 

Kristen:

“It’s on the brands to find new ways to differentiate themselves at the page level so readers better understand the nuances that go into these meticulously crafted roundups. In fact, I think Substack shopping newsletters represent a backlash to the “SEO farms.” Individual creators [there] have the space to be more voicey, more critical and less formulaic; they’ve also presumably built more trust with their readership and often have higher conversion rates with smaller audiences. Bigger publishers, meanwhile, just move at a slower pace — and once they find a formula that hits, they need really compelling evidence to shift a variable.” 

Kevin:

“Advertising in one form or another is inevitable. At least two things can speak to the potential net positive of online publications embracing product reviews. First, the content is generally sectioned off. Even if it’s a topline menu item, the web real estate is often well defined. It’s clear that you click here for the buyers’ guides and product reviews and over here for the journalism and editorial pieces. The buckets are organized. Only click on the journalism buckets if that’s what you’re after. Second, experienced reporters and editors with investigative backgrounds are often doing a lot of work to produce quality commerce content. Isn’t a well-researched article digging into product features better than flimsier forms of advertising?”

Saturating reputable publications with product content can dilute and harm those media brands.

Kristen:

“There’s a very high risk of oversaturating a media brand with commerce content if the goal is to maximize profit at all costs. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are two keys to making sure commerce content doesn’t dilute a publication’s brand identity: intentional, on-brand coverage and a strategic ratio of editorial to commerce content. 

If you want to preserve brand identity, you have to be rigorous about making sure your commerce team focuses on the products that your audience truly turns to you for. That may mean rejecting lucrative, money-bucket categories in favor of more niche, lower average-order-volume ones—but if you want to maintain brand integrity, that’s the right choice for you. The second factor will depend on whether you truly see your brand as a commerce-forward brand or an editorial brand. A commerce-forward brand may be completely comfortable with a ratio of, say, half commerce articles, half top- and mid-funnel articles (to eventually drive consumers to purchase). But for an editorially focused brand, that’s way too much commerce content and may cause your readership to lose trust in you. It comes down to making long-term, strategic choices for the brand instead of grabbing the easy, obvious earners.”

Connor:

“Along with online publications, oversaturation of sales content on social media channels is bad news. We experience highly targeted and curated content we don’t control, and it’s all ads all the time. You watch a YouTube video and there is an in-video ad followed by a commercial, or it’s a sponsored Instagram reel followed by an ad for the latest gym short. Everyone has grown tired.”

Racquel:

“There’s a kind of negative emotional weight you feel when you know a beloved publication is losing the battle with the excessive demands of its conglomerate’s shareholders. You want substance, evidence, variety, humor and original, critical thinking on issues and cultural phenomena — not constant product messaging that makes you want to wash off the sales muck. If e-commerce is so expansive and so complete across dozens or hundreds of once-trusted outlets and socials, isn’t it just resulting in a kind of eye-glazing sameness every time we open our devices? Is that the ultimate footprint of private equity’s homogeneity of purpose?”   

Kristen: 

[Responding to the emotional weight of saturation] “That’s valid. On the content creation side, so many of my colleagues and I entered journalism and media because of its expansive, creative possibilities. We could research anything, break a major story or dive deep into an immersive, feature-length article. Even now, as someone who works in e-commerce and appreciates it, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of articles and opinions I’m inundated with. For most purchases, I find myself yearning for a few good recommendations from someone I know personally. I wonder if there’s a space for publications (or at least individual creators) to focus more on how products make them feel and less on the easily compared features and specs. That, to me, satisfies the need for ‘deep,’ perspective-driven commerce content that feels less ‘ugh, capitalism.’

“Right now, everyone’s panicking that they’re going to fall behind in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and revenue if they don’t produce, produce, produce. So they’re throwing all sorts of spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, and then retro-fitting a strategy to try and replicate those outcomes.”

GenAI will amplify inundation, but video and e-newsletters hold some answers.

Racquel:

“With GenAI, you only need a small number of quality e-commerce reviewers doing very real legwork, then AI can take their sentiments and spin it into dozens or hundreds of versions with original wording. That’s what private equity and hedge funds controlling media conglomerates will try to do across their media brands. The same thing will happen with formulaic kinds of storytelling like aggregating social media posts and quotes on some incident or celebrity, or compiling the five ways to do X. It’s an area ripe for GenAI automation and even exploitation.” 

Kristen:

“I think the answer here will be publications investing more in original video and images that AI can’t (easily) replicate. Not only will this show writers with the product in hand, doing actual testing, but it opens up a whole new avenue of discovery beyond the SERPs. Someone watches a Shape YouTube video reviewing the Best Treadmills and searches for that specific article as a result to learn more. 

“We may also see some brands investing more in their email newsletters. I’ve been watching my millennial cohort migrate over to Substack, which feels refreshingly like the OG blogging days. If a publication can hit the jackpot with a high-quality newsletter — probably driven by a recognizable personality with a unique voice, instead of a generic ‘From The Editors’ — they could fundamentally change the way their readers shop.”

Fast Company reported that “for 2023 as a whole, more than 21,400 media jobs were lost, the highest (excluding 2020) since 2009.” This year started with brutal cuts. Media’s stabilization and realignment remains a guessing game because: “The ad industry doesn’t need the news industry when there are so many other ways to purchase attention, and so many better ways to target users.” 

So, Wired is turning to mattresses, taking what it can get.

But CNN also noted that, “Research produced by Columbia University in October estimated that technology titans Google and Meta should pay news outlets $14 billion per year in revenue for their search traffic and content, a figure it described as ‘conservative.’” And a lot of people still like to read, not abbreviated nuggets of nothing, but thoughtful content. 

Our desire to read may yet prevail.