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Would big-name universities pay a magazine to write puff pieces about them? You bet.
Guest: Francie Diep, senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education
Related Reading:
- The Colleges That Pay for Positive Coverage
- Even for ‘Mad Men’ Obsessives, Higher Ed Marketing Inspires Unease
- Welcome to the Sponsored Campus: More parts of the college experience are up for sale than ever before, experts say.
Transcript
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Would big-name universities pay a magazine to write puff pieces about them? You bet.
Guest: Francie Diep, senior reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education
Related Reading:
- The Colleges That Pay for Positive Coverage
- Even for ‘Mad Men’ Obsessives, Higher Ed Marketing Inspires Unease
- Welcome to the Sponsored Campus: More parts of the college experience are up for sale than ever before, experts say.
Transcript
This transcript was produced using speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.
Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle. I’m Jack Stripling.
Francie Diep Universities at the very least should decline to participate in something that is making all of our lives worse instead of actually paying to be part of it.
Jack Stripling There are about 3200 nonprofit colleges in the United States, and all of them are vying for recognition and attention. To stand out in this crowded field, colleges pour untold resources into advertising, branding campaigns, and recruitment of top flight faculty and students, often in the hopes of boosting their national rankings or generating positive news coverage. There’s little, it seems, that colleges won’t do to move the reputation needle in a positive direction. But even Chronicle reporters, who cover higher education every day, were jarred by our own Francie Diep’s recent reporting on higher education’s branding wars. Today on the show, we’ll talk with Francie about a dubious new tactic some colleges are using to get a bit of good press.
Jack Stripling Francie, welcome to College Matters. Thanks for being here.
Francie Diep Hi. Great to be here.
Jack Stripling So, Francie, you’re a Chronicle reporter who has spent a lot of time thinking about college rankings, which is one of the many ways colleges try to get public recognition. What kind of pressure are colleges facing to stand out? Has it become more challenging to do that?
Francie Diep We’ve seen more of a bifurcation of colleges with haves and have nots, basically. And the haves are getting more applications than ever, but that’s just a handful of, I don’t know, 20, 50 universities that have really strong reputations and brand names. And so everyone else is struggling with enrollment. So that just makes the chase for reputation, prestige, brand recognition, out-of-state students who are willing to apply to your college across the country even more acute.
Jack Stripling These colleges we read a lot about in mainstream media that get a ton of coverage, they’re not necessarily having to do a lot to elevate their brand. I’m sure they do a ton, but it’s kind of baked in the cake for a lot of these institutions. And then there’s this whole sea of climbers that you’re describing.
Francie Diep: Yeah. For sure.
Jack Stripling: Tell me a little bit about what kinds of things colleges like that are doing to gain some reputation points.
Francie Diep Oh, I mean, there are a ton of things that colleges can do and try to do, and most of them are on the up and up. Things that we understand as an industry are like, okay things to do. You know, you can start social media feeds. A lot of prospective students these days sort of get a sense of what colleges are going to be like by looking at their TikToks and like posts from students that are already enrolled at the college. So there’s a lot of that. There’s like the real traditional PR kind of stuff that colleges can do, such as putting out press releases about the great donations that are getting; about the first generation low-income students they serve; the lives they change;
pitching their faculty members as experts to the media.
Jack Stripling Yeah. It’s not uncommon to say there’s an eclipse coming, we have an eclipse expert. Dear Chronicle, you should write about this person or dear Wall Street Journal, right? I mean this is a very common thing.
Francie Diep Yes, exactly.
Jack Stripling And the coin of the realm here is what we’d call earned media, right? That a reporter calls you up and says, I understand you have the foremost expert on eclipses, and I’d like to talk to them, right? Universities, that’s their love language.
Francie Diep Yes.
Jack Stripling So you recently stumbled upon another way, though, that colleges are trying to elevate their brands. Tell me about that.
Francie Diep So this was fascinating. It started with a tip. It came from a long time director of press relations for actually Washington University in Saint Louis. He is retired now, but he got a pitch from a magazine called CIO Views. This pitch basically was like, hey, if you give us $3,500, we will feature you as some kind of foremost influencer in higher ed. We’ll give you a cover story, we’ll write the story for you, we’ll give you ads to put in our magazine. All you need to do is pay up. Our tipster was real mad about this. He also sent an angry email back to the salesperson who had pitched him. Among other things, said ‘Scam alert. Isn’t often that I respond to spurious sales pitches offered in the disguise of journalism. Your unwelcome emails are promoting such a scandalous and spurious pay for play scam that I want you to know that I am reporting your shameful offer to the Society for Professional Journalists.’ He told me he did not get an answer to this email. When I saw that, I was immediately surprised, interested. The problem with this in particular is that it is not labeled as advertising. Like after seeing the tip, I looked up the magazine online and like tried to find anywhere in the magazine where it says these are paid-for ads, and there’s no labeling anywhere. I acknowledge that maybe this is not the most outrageous or like that it may not strike a non-journalist in the same way. But as a journalist, the big thing for us, right, is that we have a way that we do our thing. We find things independently, we make independent judgments about who is the greatest influencer in higher ed. We do outside reporting. We don’t just rely on one person to tell us they’re the greatest. And to see a publication offer what looks like journalism, but is actually, in essence, a paid advertisement, one where the client gets all the control that they want and gets to say whatever they want about how great they are, and to brand it as journalism, it was really striking to me.
Jack Stripling Yeah, because there is such a thing in journalism as sponsored content. We have some of that on the Chronicle’s website, right? A university will pay us to put something out there. We have a big label that’s saying this is sponsored content. That was not happening in this magazine?
Francie Diep: Correct. Correct.
Jack Stripling: I’d never heard of CIO Views before I looked at your story. What did you learn about this magazine as you poked around their website?
Francie Diep The magazine has a funny mix of both markers of traditional magazines, but stuff is missing. So, it doesn’t take long to get a sense that something is a little bit off. The writing is a bit strange. The kind of, the grammatical mistakes that appear in it are a little funny. They do a lot of top ten kind of lists, which is an interesting way that they sort of parallel the more legitimized, I guess, rankings world top ten universities to do X. And then…
Jack Stripling And that stuff might look like something that would be in U.S. News?
Francie Diep Yeah, a little bit, except that they’ll be colleges you’ve never heard of, which that doesn’t mean, that just because you haven’t heard of a college doesn’t mean it’s not great at something you know, but usually the way that rankings have developed over the last 30 years is that top ranked, quote unquote colleges, are ones with some name brand recognition. And it is striking to see like a whole page of like top ten biology schools or whatever, where they’re just not schools that you have heard of with really well known programs. So that was a little striking. There’s nowhere on the website that has a masthead so another important part of journalism is accountability, right? Like you want to know who wrote this story, who’s responsible if there is a mistake. And in this case there’s no one to pin it down on, no full names. There is an editor’s letter in the front, presumably from the editor-in-chief, but there’s no full name associated with it. It just says, ‘Mousmi N.’ So you don’t… who’s Mousmi? What is their last name? The magazine has what looks like stories and then ads interspersed in between the stories.
Jack Stripling Right.
Francie Diep The ads, if you look a little more closely, seem a little strange. For example, in one of the 2023 issues of this magazine, so well beyond when the pandemic kind of started, there was a Nissan ad that kind of made a social distancing joke. It shows these bundled up people in winter really far apart, standing at a bus stop. Not the kind of thing you expect a company to put out in 2023. I ended up actually emailing a bunch of the advertisers in here, and one of them, Nissan, got back to me and said they did not actually place this ad in the magazine. These are just ads that I guess the editors of this magazine had pulled from I don’t know where, and added to their magazine to make it look like they have legit paid-for ads.
Jack Stripling Well, I mean, I guess good for Nissan. They’ve benefited from this. I’m curious about who’s reading this thing. I’m curious who the audience is for CIO Views or a magazine like it.
Francie Diep I looked up the web traffic. It’s pretty low. It’s lower even than… there was like a super small town paper I was comparing it to, and it’s even, the traffic is lower that. So in a sense no one is reading it, which I find also kind of funny. I feel like the point of these stories is so that someone, somewhere can say our chief diversity officer, our provost, our president, was featured in this magazine. Our president was named one of the top ten innovators in higher ed. Our dean, you can see him on the cover. Look, we’re going to put this picture in a press release so you can see that he has like been profiled by a magazine. They exist so you can say those things, not so anyone can actually read the stories is my sense, although there is some traffic, so I guess some people are reading these stories.
Jack Stripling So no less a source than CIO Views says we’re the best at something.
Francie Diep Yes. Yes.
Jack Stripling And this ends up in university press releases and so forth, as if it happened, again, in The New York Times or elsewhere.
Francie Diep Right. Which, I mean, can you imagine like these are actually ads. They are ads. A client pays for the service and gets full control over the imagery and text that goes in these. Imagine if a press office were transparent and said, ‘Guys, we bought an ad and it appeared in The Wall Street Journal.’ Like, you would never put out a press release about the fact that you bought an ad, and this is what they’re doing with the CIO Views stories, and pretending like, ‘oh, surprise, we’ve been named the top most innovative business school.’
Jack Stripling You know, I said, at the top, there’s like 3,200 colleges, nonprofit colleges in the country. I guess maybe my feeling about this is different depending on who’s doing it. Are these places I’ve never heard of that are spending a little bit of money just to have some way to promote themselves, or are there bigger names in the mix?
Francie Diep There is a surprisingly large range of types of colleges that do this. As you can imagine, there are a number of sort of small private colleges that perhaps do have some challenges with enrollment that they’re trying to overcome. But there are a couple of big names, too. So the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, their business school, bought a couple of stories for their dean.
Jack Stripling This is a really major public research university.
Francie Diep Yes, and a dean that has received accolades from real journalistic outlets, too. You wouldn’t think they would need more than what they’ve already gotten. But they bought a couple of stories from CIO Views. And then MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory also featured one of their administrators in one of these stories.
Jack Stripling Wow, MIT.
Francie Diep Yeah.
Jack Stripling Are there other magazines that are doing this?
Francie Diep Yes, there are other websites that offer this similar kind of service and they will, like CIO Views, send pitches to press officers laying out, hey, pay us X amount of money and we’ll put up a story about you written to your specifications. I learned this just from talking with the press officers who’d bought CIO Views stories. I asked them, do you get these pitches a lot? And most of them, under the condition of anonymity, said yes, and sent me other pitches they’ve seen. CIO Views, honestly, is kind of like one of the nicer ones, like it has better writing.
Jack Stripling So tell me a little bit about the reporting here. I mean, it sounds like this initial email sort of spelled a lot out. You had an exchange between, I guess, a former university official and the magazine that gave you a pretty decent sense of what was probably afoot here, but how did you manage the reporting after that?
Francie Diep Immediately, my first thought was, let’s see if there are any public universities who have bought these stories. In most states, there are a few funny exceptions, but in almost all states, a public university is open to public records requests. You know, with the idea that the public has a right to see how money is used. So I submitted several records requests because I wanted to learn a couple of things. One, were all the stories paid? I wasn’t sure if they were all paid for or not. And I wanted to get a sense of the editorial process here. Most of the time, I mean, nobody’s, I don’t mean to be mean, but very few people have heard of CIO Views. So most colleges do not go to CIO Views seeking this service. What they do is they, CIO Views salespeople email them a pitch and they accept it or not. All the records that I got, email exchanges, they laid out the editorial process, were basically the same, which is that a sales person from CIO Views sends a pitch over, makes it clear you pay for this. You get these benefits. It’s very clearly editorial control given to the university. And then a press officer writes back, sounds good; we’ll pay. And that just kicks off this whole process where they’re kind of going back and forth on drafts. The first step often is kind of like an interview, which is a bit like what journalists do. CIO Views actually offers Zoom interviews, but in the records I saw, most of the time they did it over email, which we know as journalists often ends… results in kind of less lively and real sounding quotes. But yes, so often the university be like, okay, sure, we’ll do an email interview. CIO Views will send over a list of questions. As far as I can tell, it’s the same list of questions for everybody. And anything that the university wants to say, the magazine will accept. They will not edit anything. They will not fact check. And the emails will very clearly say, here’s a draft, let us know what you want changed and we’ll change it. In the end, before publication, the PR team also sort of gets a final look and comments on the layout with imagery and text and everything. Again, like, this is how you would offer an ad to a client basically.
Jack Stripling So what you’re seeing here is a magazine that is ceding essentially full editorial control to the university in exchange for payment.
Francie Diep: Yes. One of my favorite, I mean no, absolutely my favorite pitch email that I saw, was to Jeffrey Brown, the dean of the business school at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. And that pitch email opening was, ‘Wishful Greetings from CIO Views magazine,’ it talks about how they’re working on something, an issue called The Ten Most Visionary Leaders Transforming the Education 2023, offered Dean Brown a spot in this magazine, said ‘CIO Views would love to feature you as a cover story of our glorious journal.’
Jack Stripling: So we should note that Jeffrey Brown has since stepped down from his role as dean at Illinois, a position he’d held since 2015. But Francie, I gotta ask you, did he accept the offer from CIO Views?
Francie Diep He did, yes.
Jack Stripling Glorius
Jack Stripling Stick around, we’ll be back in a minute.
Jack Stripling What are colleges paying for these puff pieces to be written? Did you get a sense of that from the records?
Francie Diep I did, something like 2,000 to 4,000 dollars per story, which is real money for most people, but also not a huge amount in especially a large university’s advertising budget.
Jack Stripling So as a journalist, you’re looking at this. Something seems not right about it. What did college officials tell you when you called them up?
Francie Diep So the public university ones, at least one private university press officer, too, were open and honest about what they’d done. You know, I think they don’t see that there’s anything wrong here. They see this as normal advertising in line with other parts of their job. They buy ads. They buy ads in The Chronicle. They buy ads, if they have the budget for it, they’ll buy ads and big general audience publications, too. So they’re willing to talk about this.One person I talked to that I actually really appreciate, he was really open with me and helped explain a lot of things to help me understand this whole world, was Aaron Bennett. He’s a spokesperson for the business school at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He had bought, I think, two, at least stories from CIO Views for his dean, who has, you know, received accolades from journalistic publications, too. He was really open about it. You know, he sees this kind of thing as normal advertising, normal part of his job. Aaron had previously been, I mean, had a full career as a journalist. He was on local news as a broadcaster. So I also asked him, like, I am on this story because a tipster sent us something where he was actually upset and he felt like this was ethically wrong. Because these stories are ads, but they’re not labeled as ads, that they are deceptive in some way, what do you think of that? And Aaron basically said, you know, maybe five years ago when I first got into this job, I would have felt the same. But the things, the things I’ve seen since, this is a normal part of this world, which maybe I’m naive, but totally shocked me.
Jack Stripling Huh. So he’s come around and we, and we don’t know what the other things were that he’s seen at this point.
Francie Diep Yeah.
Jack Stripling So we have a good understanding of how this works, Francie. But who’s behind CIO Views? Who’s on the other end of these emails?
Francie Diep: I got in touch with a salesperson for CIO Views, and they asked her, are all those stories paid for? And she said, yes. I heard back from Mousmi N. That is the only name that you can see in any of the public facing parts of CIO Views. That’s the name that is signed at the bottom of editor’s letters that appear in the front of every PDF issue of this magazine. She actually did not get back to me until after my story was published. But it turns out she does have a last name, it’s Naidu, N-A-I-D-U. She told me that not all of the stories are paid for, and she said that she would provide me with evidence that that’s true. That was the very last time I heard from her. I followed up with her. She never did provide that evidence to me. Previously, before the publication of my story, a salesperson had gotten back to me and told me that all the stories are paid for. Mousmi said that salesperson was in big trouble. When I asked her whether the magazine is misleading readers because it doesn’t label its ads as such, she wrote back, ‘We acknowledge that transparency is paramount. However, we believe that what truly matters to our readers is the valuable insights and information they gain from our content,’ which is um, you know, a funny answer, right? Like what valuable information are readers getting from puffery written by a press office? So to try to figure out who’s actually responsible for this, I looked at my records requests, which include emails, email pitches from salespeople from CIO Views, and payment records. And in those, you kind of see the same physical address listed in each of these things. And it’s for a small town in Wyoming. So I just dropped this address into Google Street Views, and lo and behold, the address points to a totally nondescript brick building in Sheridan, Wyoming. And the sign says Wyoming Corporate Office. I was like, what? What even is Wyoming Corporate Office? This is like Acme and like the Wile E. Coyote cartoons, where he, like, orders his dynamite from a totally generic company. Anyway, so that was quite funny. And that led me down a really kind of fun rabbit hole. Turns out Wyoming Corporate Office, it is an address that is available for companies that are not based in Sheridan, Wyoming, but are based anywhere else in the country; they just want a physical address in Wyoming because that gives them some good business taxes. A local paper in Sheridan actually did a story on this kind of thing a few years ago and discovered that something like 88,000 businesses have this exact same address as CIO Views because they’re all using this Wyoming Corporate Office for tax purposes.
Jack Stripling Turns out that Sheridan, Wyoming is the business capital of the universe.
Francie Diep Yes, yes. It’s a funny detail, but there’s also nothing legally wrong with doing this. Businesses may have different reasons that they want an address that’s in Wyoming, but they want to operate somewhere else.
Jack Stripling I am curious, as somebody who writes a lot about rankings and prestige, what does all this tell you about prestige and how it works? And what does it mean that places that already have solid national reputations are doing this kind of thing?
Francie Diep This is kind of speculation, but, you know, I wonder if part of it is this sense that anything helps, any little thing. You’re just like throwing stuff against the wall, little bits into the fire. It’s all fine. And maybe something will stick for someone. And again, because the price point for these is not like super, super high, maybe that’s part of the motivation too. Our tipster did kind of hint like maybe it’s something that people do so they can tell their bosses, look, I got you a cover on a magazine, which is, would be otherwise so hard, you know. I don’t know, it’s possible maybe that some leaders want that and expect that and consider that to be like a marker of you as the press person doing a good job and like, how do you achieve that? Well, you can purchase it.
Jack Stripling And do the colleges think these stories are accurate, I mean, I can see a dean saying, somebody finally understands me.
Francie Diep Yes. Yeah. That’s another thing, is that the press people will say, well, you know, this is totally on the up and up and ethically okay, because it’s accurate. Everything is accurate. Well, I mean, maybe that’s true, but like, do you believe a person writing about themselves to be totally accurate and have great perspective on themselves? Not exactly, right?
Jack Stripling So why does it matter that universities in particular are doing this? Is it different than, say, like a theme park or a tech company paying a magazine to write some flattering profile of their CEO?
Francie Diep I do think there’s a real difference, because the whole mission of universities is knowledge generation. They’re supposed to be about the truth, about real knowledge in the world. And what is happening here is that they are presenting something as journalistic, as an attempt at, you know, portraying the world as it is in a balanced and fair manner, when actually it is an ad. It is deceptive to not label ads as such. I take the point that not a lot of people are reading CIO Views. There are not a lot of people directly harmed, you might say, from these kind of practices, but they all, and this is something that sort of journalism ethics experts told me, contribute to an environment online right now that is very difficult and confusing for consumers, which is that you don’t know where information comes from, you don’t know who wrote things, if it was even human or AI. What the motivations were or the payment structures were for the different answers you get when you search, for example, what is the best biology school for me? Universities, at the very least should decline to participate in something that is making all of our lives worse, instead of actually paying to be a part of it.
Jack Stripling I want to ask a little bit about your journey before we go. You mentioned, I’m not naive, I know colleges do a lot of different things to try to get ahead. But did this reporting in any small way change your perspective of how colleges are going about building their brands?
Francie Diep I was definitely shocked that this was a thing. And I was shocked at how much the press offices took this for granted, too. They were like, oh yeah, we get these pitches all the time. They weren’t like, wow, this is a thing that’s happening. I, Francie Diep, did not know that these pay-for-play magazines existed. I would not have guessed if they did exist that colleges would pay for them again, Higher ed, the sector that is there to create knowledge and spread truth. It’s not a huge, huge deal because not every college does this, and there are not a whole lot of readers necessarily for these pieces. But the fact that it exists at all, and that a range of colleges with a range of reputations and size and missions all participate, did change my view of university press offices a little bit.
Jack Stripling Well, Francie, thanks so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. It’s a fascinating story.
Francie Diep Thanks so much.
Jack Stripling To read Francie’s story, The Colleges That Pay For Positive Coverage, visit chronicle.com.
College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our original podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Laura Krantz, Sarah Brown, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.