How This Guy Lied His Way Into MSNBC, ABC News, The New York Times and More

[PoliticAverse]

Ryan Holiday could be called an “expert.” As head of marketing for American Apparel, an online strategist for Tucker Max, and self-styled “media manipulator,” he can talk social media and modern advertising with the best of them – he’s done so both online and in print on countless occasions. He is not an expert in barefoot running, investing, vinyl records, or insomnia. But he is a liar. With a little creative use of the internet, he’s been quoted in news sources from small blogs to the most reputable outlets in the country talking about all of those things.

Holiday, 25 years old and based in New Orleans, mostly wanted to see if it could be done. He had been getting blogs to write what he wanted for years, and had developed a sense of how stories were put together in the internet age. He thought he could push the envelope a bit further.

“I knew that bloggers would print anything, so I thought, what if, as an experiment, I tried to prove that they will literally print anything?” he says. “Instead of trying to get press to benefit myself, I just wanted to get any press for any reason as a joke.”

Read the rest at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/07/18/how-this-guy-lied-his-way-into-msnbc-abc-news-the-new-york-times-and-more/

[salvorhardin]

1. I posted Ryan Holiday's article at CJR in GD earlier today but it didn't get a very good reception

[div class="excerpt" style="background-color:#FAEDC8;"]

[div style="font-size:1.3em;"]Our Gullible Media: How the singular pursuit of traffic makes online media suckers for fake news

The speculation frenzy Bloggers have to churn out dozens of posts a day. A recent lawsuit filed against Reuters revealed that bloggers were required to write more than eight posts a day, and clock as much as 20 hours a week of unpaid overtime to do it. Bloggers have repeatedly told me that their daily quotas hang over their heads and influence almost every publishing decision they make.

Their editors have made it this way. GigaOm founder Om Malik brags that he’s written more than 11,000 posts and 2 million words in the last decade. When even the boss is churning out three posts a day, you know that the pressure is real.

As a result, no topic is off limits, no source too sketchy, no story too speculative if it will result in an extra post. Veteran bloggers John Biggs and Charlie White put it well in their book Blogger Bootcamp, when they reminded aspiring bloggers that there is “no topic too mundane that you can’t pull a post out of it.”

People like me have incredible luck getting coverage just by sending fake, anonymous “tips” to bloggers about the things we want them to write about. No one has the time, and few have the interest, to verify before publishing. Michael Arrington, who parlayed dubious scoops on his blog TechCrunch into a $25 million acquisition by AOL, said it himself: “Getting it right is expensive, getting it first is cheap.” You can’t tell me it’s not easy to manipulate someone so transparent about his self-interest.

Full article: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/media_manipulator_ryan_holiday.php?page=all


Ryan Holiday's book, Trust Me, I'm Lying, sounds interesting too.

You’ve seen it all before. A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you don’t know is that someone is responsible for all this. Usually, someone like me.

I’m a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs—as much as any one person can.

In today’s culture…
1) Blogs like Gawker, Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post drive the media agenda.
2) Bloggers are slaves to money, technology, and deadlines.
3) Manipulators wield these levers to shape everything you read, see and watch—online and off.

Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I'm tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. I'm pulling back the curtain because I don't want anyone else to get blindsided.

I’m going to explain exactly how the media really works. What you choose to do with this information is up to you.

[div style="text-align: center;"]

Link: http://www.amazon.com/Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator/dp/159184553X

Originally posted: http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002974222

[PoliticAverse]

2. Thanks, I searched but didn't see it because I forgot to change the search from 'Thread Title' to

'Original Post'.

[salvorhardin]

3. That's OK. Right now Ryan Holiday is all over the place.

It's interesting too that most people miss the fact that he's using the same techniques (sans the lying) that he talks about in his book to [em]sell[/em] his book.

[jade3000]

4. Yep, selling & lying cirally

Exactly. I never heard of this guy before today, and all of sudden I know his whole "story" and the title of his book. There's multiple levels of manipulation and marketing happening here. It's both a cautionary tale and tall tale.