Editorial Independence versus Product Placement

Hamburg.
The next speaker at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is Volker Lilienthal, Augstein Foundation Professor at the University of Hamburg. He notes the reception theory-based definition of quality which Rainer Esser highlighted in the previous presentation, but himself continues with a production theory-based definition, which holds that journalists can also produce quality journalism even if their audience is no longer interested in such content.

Product placement, he notes, may be acceptable if editorial independence remain unaffected. But how can this work in a concrete case - editors and journalists, after all, are employees of their organisations, and are unlikely to be entirely independent from their economic agendas. Journalists must try, though, to make clear decisions about what content is relevant, what audiences should be confronted with, and what content is merely a result of particular business or other interests.

Volker notes that product placement is likely also to increasingly affect information content, in addition to entertainment material. Indeed, infotainment content already exists in a grey area, of course - the gratis provision of products to be reviewed, for example, is already possible under current legal frameworks, and there is an open question as to how much this may affect editorial content.

Volker now shows a number of actual examples from product placement offers - for example, a letter offering product placement opportunities in travel documentaries (by acting out pre-scripted scenes which require the use of products to be advertised). On that basis, quality is not present in television, online, and print media, he suggests, if such practices are common in media production.

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