When I worked at an actual newspaper, the press liaison at the local hospital hated us because we'd always rewrite her at the Times while the Leader just did the press release.
However, I can't really fault them for that because they were a daily and we printed just three times a week and the press releases were clearly marked as such (as they are here). We had time to write out own stories; they needed to fill up space, to be perfectly honest. That's the ethical compromise; perfect world, yeah, everything would be done by reporters, but realistically, small staff of a small newspaper (or Internet magazine equivalent, I suppose), I mean, it's not feasible (and I honestly don't know if there's a hell of a lot of difference between a company/group/whatever asking for a story to be written versus writing their own; I mean, just pure politeness is going to weigh on a reporter's ability to be objective). USA Today runs front page press releases, screw them. They can afford to do the story.
Basically, this is Journalistic Ethics 101; there's literally been nearly two centuries of people already thinking how we should approach this for us, and we've taken the already proscribed and approved method.
When I worked at an actual newspaper, the press liaison at the local hospital hated us because we'd always rewrite her at the Times while the Leader just did the press release.
However, I can't really fault them for that because they were a daily and we printed just three times a week and the press releases were clearly marked as such (as they are here). We had time to write out own stories; they needed to fill up space, to be perfectly honest. That's the ethical compromise; perfect world, yeah, everything would be done by reporters, but realistically, small staff of a small newspaper (or Internet magazine equivalent, I suppose), I mean, it's not feasible (and I honestly don't know if there's a hell of a lot of difference between a company/group/whatever asking for a story to be written versus writing their own; I mean, just pure politeness is going to weigh on a reporter's ability to be objective). USA Today runs front page press releases, screw them. They can afford to do the story.
Basically, this is Journalistic Ethics 101; there's literally been nearly two centuries of people already thinking how we should approach this for us, and we've taken the already proscribed and approved method.