My New Job as CEO of Me Inc! (Urgh)

The Brand Alphabet

In this week’s lecture Rick Waghorn, founder of MyFootballWriter mapped out the future of journalism as he sees it – for journalists to flourish in the digital age they must develop individual brands.

There is nothing new in this idea. AA Gill, Charlie Brooker, Henry Winter and (mind-bogglingly) Jeremy Clarkson have all built up large, loyal followings and as a result they have developed powerful media brands. Previously this was the preserve of a rarefied group of star names, now even journalist students like myself are being urged to think about our brands.

Why? Because the internet has changed all the rules, making individual’s brands easier to establish, maintain and measure.

This fantastic article from the New York Observer points out that once it took decades for a brilliant journalist like Tom Wolfe to become a brand.

“That was before anyone with a blog and a Flickr account could burrow into a writerly niche and, if all went according to plan, come out burnished by the soft glow of Internet fame. The days when a writer actually had to have a body of significant work in print to be famous are over. Now, a sort of equivalency gets established between Tom Wolfe and … Perez Hilton?”

And this is where I start to get a bit nervous. As much I as I can admire perezhilton.com as an exercise in gossip-mongering, I baulk at the suggestion that he stands toe to toe with an epoch-defining journalist like Wolfe.

This is the problem I have with journalists as brands – it threatens to make self-publicity more important than journalistic ability.

Think I’m being paranoid? This 1997 article, one of the first to spell out the philosophy of self-branding, is explicit: “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle.”

The whole piece is toe-curlingly excruciating, using the kind of motivational psycho-bullshit that even David Brent might draw the line at.

For example:

“We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.”

Now don’t get me wrong, I am under no illusions as to the seismic scale of the changes our industry is currently going through and in the current climate I am more than willing to do whatever I can to sell myself to employers.

But let’s not lose sight of the values that underpin journalism and avoid the irreversible drift to becoming just another business.

The worst case scenario as I see it was mapped out in this post by online journalism guru Jeff Jarvis ( a post which interestingly starts with a discussion about Rick Waghorn).

So what if the newsroom of the future isn’t a room at all but an open network of journalists who succeed or fail by the value of what they do and their reputations and credibility?

What a grim future that would be. In an industry where fierce competition and egoistical point-scoring render ridiculous the idea of teamwork in a newsroom, do we really need to go even further and reduce newspapers to a disparate collection of individual journalists, working by themselves and for themselves?

Besides, I feel this whole idea of journalists as brands has been overstretched. Mr Waghorn cited Robert Peston as being a bigger brand than the BBC during periods of the credit crunch, but one of my colleagues pointed out that without the BBC branding behind him would Peston have been able to gather anywhere near the same number of leads?

A savvy New York Times journalist is quoted in the New York Observer article cited above as saying:

“When people are kissing me on both cheeks, one of those cheeks says New York Times.” 

So let’s not get too wrapped up in this idea of us as brands. At its most innocent it may be distracting, at its worst it could be poisonous.

The challenge for the media organisations is to make sure their recruitment processes are able to recognise and reward talent above all. The challenge for us as trainee journalists is to ensure that we develop that talent.