Right, they're still sitting on a LOT of real estate tax-free. They can weather 4chan's disrespect and bide their time until say, loyalist Will Smith decides to "come out" in their favor, gaining a ton of new celeb-obsessed converts.
The true story of scientology has already been told. A mediocre sci-fi author realized he could make a lot of money by inventing a bullshit story [1] and then proceeded to recruit a bunch of brownshirts [2].
And frankly, I think it's high time to kick them the fuck out of Berlin, at the very least. We tried radiating the cancer; it's time to reach for the scalpel.
I don't disagree, but it is socially unacceptable to say such things about thugs in other religions, just Scientology - and they may be freely promoted in the press with equal quantities of distortion - this bothers me a great deal.
it is socially unacceptable to say such things about thugs in other religions
It is? I didn't get that memo. To me it's socially unacceptable not to. People just ought to realize that being free-thinking, and in parts actually intelligent people gives them so much more power and so much more agility. Just look at scientology, look at their messiah, look at Tom Cruise.. they aren't that bright. They're bottom-feeding, they are preying on weak and/or vulnerable people.
What gets me about Scientology is how stupid it is, how obvious, and how white middle-class. It's hard to accept it was taken seriously for a second decades ago, but that they are expanding? It's like Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor, sometimes I really really wonder what kind of planet I'm on.
Maybe the idea is to make it all so crazy and horrible that people will cling to any story? I mean, let's just assume scientology was 100% true and correct: why has nobody successfully achieved their god status yet? They're just recruiting, never arriving, besides being super selfish assholes(oh yeah, those "body thetans", deported and mass killed people.. they are causing problems, let's get "rid of them"... just wow) on that never-ending way .
And yes, you could say exactly that about many other religions as well, and certainly Christianity and Islam; but that isn't reason to criticize any individual one less, the opposite is true. I say lean into it. It can be ugly, or even scary, but I believe appeasement would have scarier results.
Haven't you noticed the relentless pounding the Catholic church has been taking for years and years now? Or listen to Penn Jillette's or Louis CK's remarks on Mormonism, or a great deal of George Carlin's material... many religions prey on the powerless, but we are offended by the efficiency with which Scientology drains its' adherents bank accounts and their will.
There's also no shortage of criticism for Islamic fundamentalism / Sharia law.
People generally don't have much patience for rhetoric that calls all religious belief evil, but specific accurate criticism usually has a place in public discourse.
Why is this relevant? It's irrelevant to Scientology's abuses and untrue. If we had the opportunity to shut down Christianity's past and current abuses, we should pursue this, whether Christianity "did it too" does not need to be brought up in every article.
I didn't say Christianity, so why did you attribute that to me? The comments on this article have drawn out some extreme vitriol about Scientology and I believe it is relevant that this is incredibly specific to Scientology, giving exceptions for other organizations which may simply be older.
I don't know understand why its going down? The downvotes should be displayed separately and should not affect the upvotes, unless the upvotes are getting deleted (by somebody or by the upvoters themselves)
You can cause the same thing to happen to any comment by rapidly clicking the upvote button. This seems to cause the upvote count to drift upward, even though you would expect it to just oscillate between two values. I've just taken parkermoseyondown's comment from 0 to 40 upvotes.
Edit: This seems to be a UI issue. After reloading his comment is sitting at only 1 upvote.
Hrm, I'll be fascinated to know whether there's a COS employee of the Atlantic or whether they give moderator accounts to their advertisers, HuffPo-style.
interesting, could this be his Disqus employee "privileges" allowing his comment to bypass moderation and if so, how does that bode for websites using Disqus? They control the discussion unless someone at Disqus wants to talk? Although ~~from what I can tell it's a free service, so they can't do much damage by leaving.~~ nevermind, there is a disqus premium service.
That was never a good idea IMHO... If you care about your readers, don't outsource comments. I cannot take websites seriously that are using Disqus (or Facebook, or other such shady, inaccountable stuff) to replace such a vital part of their online operations.
Yes ... I appreciated that one too. I'm sure they're monitoring HN since this place is such a bastion of scientists, so it might be disappearing shortly.
"Collusion" seems like overstating the case a little to me. I'd be more shocked if the opposite were true -- if the site publisher wanted to remove a comment, and Disqus, for whatever reason, wouldn't let them. Disqus isn't supposed to be making editorial decisions on their customers' sites; if someone wants to be an idiot and moderate out non-cheerleading comments, it's not Disqus' place to override that decision.
I suppose you could come up with a theory where The Atlantic talked/bribed Disqus into doing the moderation for them, but it seems much more straightforward to assume that it's the admins at The Atlantic who were filtering comments.
By they, I mean the Atlantic, not Disqus. Though, it wouldn't surprise me if they had contract moderator options available for companies who don't want to employ their own.
I love how they captured the confetti in mid-air in each and every photograph. There's nothing scientology does that isn't choreographed and there's nothing scientology does that isn't bullshit.
"Every so often, the Church of Scientology goes up against the Internet.
Every so often, the Church of Scientology gets its ass handed to it."
These are not equal. They never get anything more than slaps on their wrist, and they employ enough lawyers and politicians to "every so often" make us all less free.
>Sponsor Content is created by The Atlantic’s Promotions Department in partnership with our advertisers. The Atlantic editorial team is not involved in the creation of this content. Email advertising@theatlantic.com to learn more.
So if the Taliban wanted to pay for content they would be fine with that too.
The Taliban doesn't have the resources. Qatar did have the resources to build al Jazeera, which is much in demand. I suppose the problem is that the Atlantic has rented itself out rather than being owned lock, stock and barrel.
Stories like this destroy the one major advantage established media, such as the Atlantic, has over new media. A trusted brand.
These types of ads (branded content, in feed ads or social ads, whatever we're going to call them) are just another step in the battle to outwit a readers BS detection system.
If I can easily tune out flashing banner ads, I can easily scan pass sponsored posts.
Not worth blowing valuable trust on a short term gain is it?
If you want a mindfuck, go to sears.com. Product results include, by default, items from Amazon affiliates. These dinosaurs truly have no clue what parts of their businesses could still have value.
But, much like Kris Kringle recommending Woolworths to Macy's customers in "Miracle on 34th Street", getting you the item you want elsewhere doesn't lose Sears a customer - It makes certain they'll check Sears first in the future.
They're sending customers to Amazon's affiliates because it gets them SEO results and they likely get a kickback.
Coming from my searches that've turned up the affiliate spam, these are generally items that have nothing to do with Sears's main product lines or that Sears is well sold out of.
I was trying to find a place that had 30 round magazines in stock before the looming ban, and ironically sears.com was the one retailer that had them in stock (by way of some small mom and pop affiliate).
I'll see your implausible useful-Sears story and raise you mine - I bought some welding electrodes that Home Depot doesn't even carry at a physical brick and mortar Sears! Admittedly Lowes might have had them, but I was already in the area.
In next year's recap they can talk about the big recruiting breakthroughs they made by writing enormous checks to struggling media outfits which allowed them to trick readers into thinking puff pieces were real content.
Someone ought to write an adblock-like extension that incorporates jwz's HERP DERP filter to arbitrary URLs, starting with http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/*
I'm not quite sure if it's 'sellout' or if it's just the church having key people at The Atlantic to make this happen, sort of like how the church had infiltrated key government organizations around the world.
> makes me pretty weary of trusting anything I read on TheAtlantic ever again
I agree.
It's a shame. Sometimes they have great content. I'd be happy to pay for that content. I even post links to that content in various places. But the sleazy way they submit posts everwhere, and this, and etc, all make me much less likely to pay them anything.
This site reads an awful lot like a bunch of left-wing conspiracy nutters. I don't know if it actually is or not, but that's the impression I get after scanning through it a bit. Not exactly a bastion of journalistic neutrality.
There's some anger there, but it calls out shills as it sees it. It's not a "left wing conspiracy" if those being targeted are literally being paid to sell a narrative.
Certainly - I'll readily admit that I didn't dig deep enough to form a solid opinion. It was just my impression after a quick scan through several pages. It's also worth noting that I didn't call it a "left wing conspiracy" - I said "left-wing conspiracy nutters", which is quite different!
I can appreciate the desire to call out shills, but if you're going to pin someone to the wall for being biased, it's best to try to do it in as unbiased and neutral a way as possible, IMO. Otherwise, you just end up looking like any other fringe whacko with a bone to pick with the people they don't like.
The facts are ~usually~ pretty good, but I'll cop that the language and phrasing is very preach-to-the-choir unnecessary. That's somewhat The Exiled's shtick, though. I just roll my eyes, they often have interesting things amid the shrillness.
Yeah, their style is off-putting to some at first glance, but the Exiled (and now nsfwcorp.com, where a bunch of exiled contributors continue to write) is pretty solid with the investigative journalism.
You have to wonder what it says about a group that they aren't afraid that their potential converts would find it weird that they need to pay for people to say how awesome they are.
Well, Hubbard flat out said that he should invent a religion in order to get rich long before he wrote Dianetics, so that tells you something about the typical scientology candidate's capacity for deductive reasoning.
The Church denies that though. Actually, the story surrounding that quote is a little murky but I'm sure it's true. I believe James Randi claims to have heard it. Anyway, followers of Scientology have a lot of other crazy stuff about Hubbard to make them weary of it, yet they persist.
Compared to their forced labor camps and harrassment campaigns of their critics, I'd say there are definite better things to focus on than apocryphal (but certainly possible) stories that persuade no one. It may be published in several unauthorized biographies and "vouched for" by a bunch of people who may or may not have even been at the convention, but it might as well be a story overhead in a bar for all it's going to persuade the credulous, who want to believe them with every fiber of their beings.
I fear what will happen when the market for pure misinformation is fully realized. When it can be delivered as seamlessly as the real thing, the opportunity for profit is massive. The Atlantic is an example of media engineering for profit that fails to trick us -- but it is much closer than sponsored content has been in the past and certainly more effective at getting me to consume it than a regular ad.
Call me a conspiracy theorist but one thing the future holds for us is more of this. Except it will take place in scientific literature, respected publications, maybe in our own homes and (purposefully or not) by the people we know and trust. We'll need a factcheck.org for regular news.
"Sponsor post" is probably as good as we will ever get from The Atlantic.
If you haven't read Stephenson's "Anathem", one of the characters makes a reference to Bogons, false pieces of information inundating the Internet.
There are low-quality bogons (the example given is a file full of gibberish) and high-quality bogons, masquerading as legitimate data but differing in only a few places, and hard to detect as such.
This is definitely a fairly high quality bogon, at first glance.
For a (hopefully) fictional example of how this could already be happening without our knowledge, check out the film "The Joneses". Pretty entertaining film too.
I don't know. Although we are talking tail end of the 90s, there's passing reference in No Logo/The Shock Doctrine (forget which, but think the former) by Naomi Klein to lifestyle marketers that would follow a couple of people in their target demo around without their knowledge.
I found this advertorial (common in newstand rags) to be incredibly informative. First, Scientology is expanding around the world. Second, I thought Scientology was banned in Germany but they opened a Church in Hamburg. Perhaps I'm just ignorant, but that was a surprise to me given their problems in the EU. They have clearly figured out how to "manage" there. Third, politicians from both parties, federal and local officials attended these events. They are becoming more and more "mainstream"
Finally, this expansion and the choice of buildings means they have a lot of money. They also have a very good taste when it comes to architecture (IMO) - they didn't build giant $100M sun temples or edifices, they've found what appear to be amazing examples of local architecture and have adapted it to their purposes.
Would that most "real" editorials were so informative.
When you run sponsored content, you're tying your brand to the brand of the advertiser who you are promoting. This usually isn't a problem, since most outfits will choose to run advertising deals with well-respected brands, and both brands become stronger (and wealthier) because of the association.
In this case, I can't imagine any outcome except for significant brand damage to The Atlantic. They had better have been cut an absolutely toe-curlingly-large check, because I expect they're going to pay for this in credibility loss pretty heavily.
They are allowed to run ads, but media should allow ads based on ethical decisions - lots of countries treat Scientology as a criminal organization (Germany: "It views it as an abusive business masquerading as a religion and believes that it pursues political goals that conflict with the values enshrined in the German constitution" Source [1], another example from Belgium: [2] )
Running a sponsored article for Scientology is, to me, akin to running an article about the great employment opportunities at Mexico's Zetas.
There are "stories" to the right that are really pro-Scientology ads, but not marked as "advertisement". The whole thing feels slimy, not even considering the subject.
In newspapers and magazines, sponsored content is very clearly labeled (which arguably this is) and made to look _different_. For example, most magazines require advertorial to be in a different typeface and font size, so that readers have a sense that it's somehow "different." The difficulty here is that, unlike a magazine in which you're flipping pages, you probably only saw _this_ page and thus have no sense about whether it "looks different."
There is a Streisand effect-like phenomenon when notorious publicity-seekers become famous due to widespread criticism. The attention, negative or not, is exactly what they want. The biggest example is probably the Westboro Baptist Church.
Wasn't The Atlantic blacklisted from Reddit a while back for spamming links? [1] So, they're not exactly known for being 'white knights'. In fact, I'm a little surprised that the greater HN community didn't remember this episode.
Someone is trying to delete downvotes as fast as they can, except more votes are arriving even faster. Stare at the counter for a few minutes, and you'll see the vote count go up and down.
By the way, can anyone even document the validity of this COS bullcrap? From what I understand they are either barely growing or shrinking from their peak.
Check out the Village Voice, they have a lot of coverage of this. Scientology is a blip, their propaganda would have you believe that is growing at an enormous rate but that could not be further from the truth, at least in the reality based community.
Bizarrely, it isn't even written very well. It's basically:
Scientology Opened 12 new offices/churches.
Followed by 12 pictures, all pretty much staged the same way, with blanket text following each picture written the following way:
City, State: Date
David Miscavige dedicated the new Church of Scientology (City) in ceremonies attend by (nnn) Scientolgists, their guests and city and state dignitaries. The Church building, which used to be (XXX) is located near (YYY)
The entire "Sponsored Content" feels like it was programmatically generated.
I'd expect better out of a high-school english student.
Despite the small label on top saying "Sponsored content" and a banner at the very bottom, which needs to be scrolled down to to be seen, I didn't feel that it had been immediately obvious that the content had been paid for and had not met the exacting standards of the Atlantic's editorial team. In fact, I had only realized that it was sponsored content once I scrolled down to the banner "sponsored by the Church of Scientology" at the very bottom.
I am afraid that continued publication of such sponsored content, especially in a subtly deceptive way like this, will invariably end up cheapening Atlantic's brand and marring your journalistic reputation. While I understand that running a magazine in the internet era is hard and subscriber revenue constitutes a smaller part of the total, I feel that the fact that this content is paid-for had absolutely not been made explicit enough and, as a subscriber, I feel that such blatant hijacking of Atlantic's identity betrays the trust of your readers and violates your journalistic duty to inform and enlighten.
It is a sponsored piece, which it does state, though I may not have noticed it if it had not been pointed out to me. It makes me very uncomfortable about continuing to pay for a subscription to your magazine. As such, I have cancelled my subscription.
The reason that this makes me so uncomfortable is that it steps outside the boundaries of traditional advertising, and steps into the role of your content. This is not so dis-similar to television shows that are chock-full of product placement, but I think that this goes even a bit further than that. This would be content that has no value at all, except for selling a certain brand beer, parading itself as a television show, dressed in the corporate logo. That is what this is, content of no value, parading itself in the Atlantic brand.
I don't appreciate this. And, I certainly don't appreciate fluff pieces that bolster organizations like Scientology coming from a company that I pay to deliver me the news. By intertwining your content with paid-for commercial interests, I simply can no longer trust that the things that I read from you will be those of journalistic integrity.
A friend of mine just became an associate editor at the Atlantic. He's a good guy, rational and open minded, I sent him this URL and the story URL. I'll be interested to see what he comes back with on the issue privately.
You know, it's entirely possible for something like that to have happened as a result of a poorly thought out advertising initiative without any ill intent on the part of the overwhelming majority of employees of Atlantic. While the editorial office and the executives of Atlantic should really know better than this, I'm not necessarily willing to jump to conclusions based on this single incident, which, moreover, appears to have caused them to reconsider their sponsored content policies.
I do like the idea of assuming incompetence (or negligence) before malice, and, well, clearly someone hasn't done their job to allow this to happen, but that's probably the extent of what happened.
Why does everyone jump out of the woodwork to say this? Even if this was an accident, which I doubt, it's still gross incompetency. This wasn't caught inside the institution. Who knows what other complete lies they'll publish next?
This is an accident like photoshopping images. And worse, they let the criminals / cultists moderate the comments. This further hurts subscribers who would use the forums to discuss the validity of the content.
The scientology organization has killed those they disagreed with in recent history and church doctrine still specifically allows a number of horrible actions, many ultimately fatal. They're a terrorist organization.
Subscribers should be looking into legal options. They literally paid for spam, from a hate group.
There is a lesson to be learned here about using third-party vendors in sensitive parts of your business.
IF you're a news outlet and you're going to let people publish "sponsored stories" and promise them the ability to moderate comments, AND you use a third-party add-on from a comments vendor, THEN you should not be surprised when an employee of that third-party company is allowed to leave whatever comments they like — no matter what your agreement with your client says.
Of course, I'm not sure that if you're a news outlet it's a good idea to let people publish sponsored quasi-news content. Newspapers have been pushing the envelope on this in the last couple of decades — remember in 1999 the LA Times upset their own staff's sense of balance when they printed a 168-page supplement on the Staples Center and split ad revenue 50/50 with the Center (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec99/la_times_12-...).
But if you're gonna do this, you've really got to do it right!
260 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadSeems like David Miscavige and Scientology are on a roll. Also it appears the media have been missing the real story.
I hadn't realized there were so many new churches opened this past year. Great report!
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5055604
And frankly, I think it's high time to kick them the fuck out of Berlin, at the very least. We tried radiating the cancer; it's time to reach for the scalpel.
It is? I didn't get that memo. To me it's socially unacceptable not to. People just ought to realize that being free-thinking, and in parts actually intelligent people gives them so much more power and so much more agility. Just look at scientology, look at their messiah, look at Tom Cruise.. they aren't that bright. They're bottom-feeding, they are preying on weak and/or vulnerable people.
What gets me about Scientology is how stupid it is, how obvious, and how white middle-class. It's hard to accept it was taken seriously for a second decades ago, but that they are expanding? It's like Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor, sometimes I really really wonder what kind of planet I'm on.
Maybe the idea is to make it all so crazy and horrible that people will cling to any story? I mean, let's just assume scientology was 100% true and correct: why has nobody successfully achieved their god status yet? They're just recruiting, never arriving, besides being super selfish assholes(oh yeah, those "body thetans", deported and mass killed people.. they are causing problems, let's get "rid of them"... just wow) on that never-ending way .
And yes, you could say exactly that about many other religions as well, and certainly Christianity and Islam; but that isn't reason to criticize any individual one less, the opposite is true. I say lean into it. It can be ugly, or even scary, but I believe appeasement would have scarier results.
People generally don't have much patience for rhetoric that calls all religious belief evil, but specific accurate criticism usually has a place in public discourse.
This is the weirdest thing I've ever read on the Atlantic. You're actually letting the Church of Scientology sponsor content on your website?
Edit: This seems to be a UI issue. After reloading his comment is sitting at only 1 upvote.
That was never a good idea IMHO... If you care about your readers, don't outsource comments. I cannot take websites seriously that are using Disqus (or Facebook, or other such shady, inaccountable stuff) to replace such a vital part of their online operations.
"Such beautiful buildings! It's a shame that Shelley Miscavige couldn't join her husband at the gala openings!"
Aren't they editing the comments for their customer?
I suppose you could come up with a theory where The Atlantic talked/bribed Disqus into doing the moderation for them, but it seems much more straightforward to assume that it's the admins at The Atlantic who were filtering comments.
Perhaps I am a victim of Poe's law.
An ExxonMobile/BP ad or something would draw ire, but this feels like a wholesale sellout of their credibility, not to mention sanity.
Every so often, the Church of Scientology goes up against the Internet.
Every so often, the Church of Scientology gets its ass handed to it.
This has been going on since 'the Internet' meant 'Usenet' for most people on the Internet.
Heh. Maybe this time will be especially amusing.
They get a few wins too.
(http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/sep/helmers.html)
Then someone tried, and found that the service had been shut down. :-(
These are not equal. They never get anything more than slaps on their wrist, and they employ enough lawyers and politicians to "every so often" make us all less free.
So if the Taliban wanted to pay for content they would be fine with that too.
Are you really likening the owners of Al Jazeera and the state of Qatar with the Taliban? Please tell me I've missed something.
These types of ads (branded content, in feed ads or social ads, whatever we're going to call them) are just another step in the battle to outwit a readers BS detection system.
If I can easily tune out flashing banner ads, I can easily scan pass sponsored posts.
Not worth blowing valuable trust on a short term gain is it?
Losing a customer must cost them more than the affiliate payment they get.
Coming from my searches that've turned up the affiliate spam, these are generally items that have nothing to do with Sears's main product lines or that Sears is well sold out of.
So The Atlantic actually created this content and some nebulous "advertisers" were mere partners?
This, on top of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4108929 and http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2012/06/13/reddit-... makes me pretty weary of trusting anything I read on TheAtlantic ever again
"Isn't that a bit late?"
I agree.
It's a shame. Sometimes they have great content. I'd be happy to pay for that content. I even post links to that content in various places. But the sleazy way they submit posts everwhere, and this, and etc, all make me much less likely to pay them anything.
http://shameproject.com/?s=atlantic&x=0&y=0
I read this a while ago and I looked into it and it's pretty convincing, so the site meshes with me at least.
I can appreciate the desire to call out shills, but if you're going to pin someone to the wall for being biased, it's best to try to do it in as unbiased and neutral a way as possible, IMO. Otherwise, you just end up looking like any other fringe whacko with a bone to pick with the people they don't like.
Edit: fixed typo
Logic and fact is needed, not conjecture.
Call me a conspiracy theorist but one thing the future holds for us is more of this. Except it will take place in scientific literature, respected publications, maybe in our own homes and (purposefully or not) by the people we know and trust. We'll need a factcheck.org for regular news.
"Sponsor post" is probably as good as we will ever get from The Atlantic.
There are low-quality bogons (the example given is a file full of gibberish) and high-quality bogons, masquerading as legitimate data but differing in only a few places, and hard to detect as such.
This is definitely a fairly high quality bogon, at first glance.
Finally, this expansion and the choice of buildings means they have a lot of money. They also have a very good taste when it comes to architecture (IMO) - they didn't build giant $100M sun temples or edifices, they've found what appear to be amazing examples of local architecture and have adapted it to their purposes.
Would that most "real" editorials were so informative.
I have seen "sponsored pages" in newspapers for many years about a lot of crap, is there a reason to consider this one worse than the average?
(Yes, scientology is evil but they are not forbidden from making ads I reckon?)
edit: the "sponsored" bit is right on top of the page, as it is in dead-tree-form newspapers too.
In this case, I can't imagine any outcome except for significant brand damage to The Atlantic. They had better have been cut an absolutely toe-curlingly-large check, because I expect they're going to pay for this in credibility loss pretty heavily.
Running a sponsored article for Scientology is, to me, akin to running an article about the great employment opportunities at Mexico's Zetas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_in_Germany
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/28/belgium-prosecutes-...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/04/cnn-busi...
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/reddit-bans-atla...
He appears to work at discus - did he use admin powers to comment on the article?
edit: "Tom Cruise • a few seconds ago I paid you for this?! Thats not nearly enough confetti"
http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/ideas-roundtable-workin...
http://cl.ly/image/0W1d2f3P0L25
That's pretty darn clear that it's a sponsored piece of content.
Scientology Opened 12 new offices/churches.
Followed by 12 pictures, all pretty much staged the same way, with blanket text following each picture written the following way:
City, State: Date
David Miscavige dedicated the new Church of Scientology (City) in ceremonies attend by (nnn) Scientolgists, their guests and city and state dignitaries. The Church building, which used to be (XXX) is located near (YYY)
The entire "Sponsored Content" feels like it was programmatically generated.
I'd expect better out of a high-school english student.
Hello,
I've been very disappointed by Atlantic's decision to run the Scientology promo article under sponsored content (http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/scientology/archive/201...).
Despite the small label on top saying "Sponsored content" and a banner at the very bottom, which needs to be scrolled down to to be seen, I didn't feel that it had been immediately obvious that the content had been paid for and had not met the exacting standards of the Atlantic's editorial team. In fact, I had only realized that it was sponsored content once I scrolled down to the banner "sponsored by the Church of Scientology" at the very bottom.
I am afraid that continued publication of such sponsored content, especially in a subtly deceptive way like this, will invariably end up cheapening Atlantic's brand and marring your journalistic reputation. While I understand that running a magazine in the internet era is hard and subscriber revenue constitutes a smaller part of the total, I feel that the fact that this content is paid-for had absolutely not been made explicit enough and, as a subscriber, I feel that such blatant hijacking of Atlantic's identity betrays the trust of your readers and violates your journalistic duty to inform and enlighten.
Best regards,
Paul Milovanov
I just saw this article on your site: http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/scientology/archive/201...
It is a sponsored piece, which it does state, though I may not have noticed it if it had not been pointed out to me. It makes me very uncomfortable about continuing to pay for a subscription to your magazine. As such, I have cancelled my subscription.
The reason that this makes me so uncomfortable is that it steps outside the boundaries of traditional advertising, and steps into the role of your content. This is not so dis-similar to television shows that are chock-full of product placement, but I think that this goes even a bit further than that. This would be content that has no value at all, except for selling a certain brand beer, parading itself as a television show, dressed in the corporate logo. That is what this is, content of no value, parading itself in the Atlantic brand.
I don't appreciate this. And, I certainly don't appreciate fluff pieces that bolster organizations like Scientology coming from a company that I pay to deliver me the news. By intertwining your content with paid-for commercial interests, I simply can no longer trust that the things that I read from you will be those of journalistic integrity.
Thank you, and goodbye.
-John
I do like the idea of assuming incompetence (or negligence) before malice, and, well, clearly someone hasn't done their job to allow this to happen, but that's probably the extent of what happened.
This is an accident like photoshopping images. And worse, they let the criminals / cultists moderate the comments. This further hurts subscribers who would use the forums to discuss the validity of the content.
The scientology organization has killed those they disagreed with in recent history and church doctrine still specifically allows a number of horrible actions, many ultimately fatal. They're a terrorist organization.
Subscribers should be looking into legal options. They literally paid for spam, from a hate group.
IF you're a news outlet and you're going to let people publish "sponsored stories" and promise them the ability to moderate comments, AND you use a third-party add-on from a comments vendor, THEN you should not be surprised when an employee of that third-party company is allowed to leave whatever comments they like — no matter what your agreement with your client says.
Of course, I'm not sure that if you're a news outlet it's a good idea to let people publish sponsored quasi-news content. Newspapers have been pushing the envelope on this in the last couple of decades — remember in 1999 the LA Times upset their own staff's sense of balance when they printed a 168-page supplement on the Staples Center and split ad revenue 50/50 with the Center (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec99/la_times_12-...).
But if you're gonna do this, you've really got to do it right!