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Comment by elemeno | Hacker News Reader

Now that's got to be a Submarine Article, with the repeated mentions of one company and the underlying narrative of Scooter companies being job providers. Simultaneously a job ad and an attempt to sway public and/or local government option in favour of scooter companies (or at the least, this scooter company) remaining in SF.

Otherwise, it's hard to believe that 'person gets a blue collar job' is something that an article would be written about...

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This is exactly the first things I thought of. The only thing missing was the byline of the PR firm that either wrote the article or paid to have it written.

I wish that had to be disclosed, it's every bit as much conflict of interest as if they had paid the newspaper to include a story.

PR firms don't write articles for legit journalists and they certainly don't pay staff journalists at the reputable publications to write them (not without disclosing them as sponsored content). At most journalist publications sponsored content is handled by an entirely different group (not the editorial team). And journalists get really annoyed if they feel like a company or PR firm is trying to tell them what to write.

A PR firm will help find a story, write a pitch, and package up the details to make the reporter's life easier (studies, data, contact info, etc). They might help with things like vetting the subject or coordinating scheduling for an interview, etc. In this case, even the photos were taken by a staff photographer for the SF Chronicle.

Is the company going to pitch a story on how many ER doctors their scooters are keeping employed because customers injure themselves? Probably not. But it's not their job to and it's certainly not unethical to pitch a positive human interest story.

Anyone can pitch a journalist. That's frequently how they find stories. And it helps if you include information that will make writing about it easier.

I don't believe this to be true. Many examples up in Canada where national newspapers kept reporting on the amazoning housing markets in many cities that mirrored press releases from the realtor associations. Real data contraticted that many times over.

Stop trying to make the word "submarine" happen. It's not going to happen.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18259355

In your linked post, you seem to be saying "Everyone knows that positive articles are usually PR, you don't need to point it out."

Everyone doesn't know that. You know it because you were an ad exec. Educating people who aren't yet sufficiently cynical about stealth advertising is a valuable goal.

Yes, if anything they should be the one trying to spread the knowledge. The fact that they are doing the opposite leads me to suspect their comments are Submarine Comments of the PR industry.

It's not stealth advertising. The SF Chronicle is a legitimate news organization that has journalistic standards.

Maybe a PR person suggested the story, maybe nobody did. Maybe the author came up with the idea and just wrote it. Maybe the author emailed around looking for examples and a PR person jumped on the idea. Who fucking knows. But nobody in this thread has any first hand info about it.

Either way it's not advertising, it's a story in the newspaper by a journalist that has ethical standards to live up to. We live in an era now where people are trying to blur the difference between ads and journalism, for a reason, so I personally care about the difference.

Also the word submarine is fucking stupid.

I understand what it means and it quite succinctly describes an article that is bought and paid for but not disclosed as such.

Regarding the link, I can see why an ex-marking executive would be annoyed about a way to easily communicate such tactics with a "buzzword". Submarine articles probably work quite well when trying to build an image for a company.

Journalists are always looking for stories to get people to read and human interest stories get clicks. So yeah there was probably a PR professional that set this up but it doesn't mean that money was exchanged behind the scenes. Certainly the PR rep was probably being paid but did they need to send a payment to the journalist or their company, not necessarily. It could be that the scooter company advertises on this media outlet and thus there was extra incentive to write this story. Who knows except the people involved. A lot of tech journalism is essentially cribbing the press release and talking all about the newest greatest piece of soon to be e-waste. The fact that we are talking about this article means it was effective in getting this story out there and associating the scooter company with humans that get paid versus the cold calculating algorithms that are replacing what would of been a human logistics team. Shrug.

Money was almost certainly not exchanged behind the scenes, as that would be completely and totally unethical, and it's pretty obnoxious to accuse the author, who has a name, of being unethical without any evidence at all.

What does it matter whether the newspaper is paid cash, or the PR firm writes the article for them? In both cases, they're getting something of value in return for favorable coverage.

Meme replies don't really belong here, you could easily copy your general argument or paraphrase it instead.

Submarine happened. I knew exactly what was meant.

How about "Paid Programming" as a term instead? Submarine might still be better. It as article intended to deceive the public as being a journalistic act, but one which is really a piece of advertising. Active deceptive acts by corporations should always be identified and called out.

I’m with you...submarine is way to nice, let’s go back to calling them “paid for PR fluff pieces”.

Now let’s write the truth...tech start up that litters public streets with their crap hired a homeless man and exploited him for the purpose of paying even scummier media folks to print a PR fluff piece under the guise of a legitimate news story...probably the same company will try to milk investors for even more money using the article as proof of their goodwill and growth.

It's not like the submarine metaphor is without precedent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_patent

There's a new class every year that need to learn the concept. Perhaps submarine is not optimal, but it is good enough.

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