Journalism and Branding: A Complicated Relationship

In the modern age of social media where websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and YouTube are available to anyone with access to a smart phone or computer, the manufacturing and maintaining of a personal brand is easier than ever. These social media engines have quickly become a successful tool for marketing and selling not just corporate-promoted materials but a person’s desired identity as well.

Behind the guise of a screen, people can conjure up any identity or image of themselves that they desire others to see. From a self-written post to the content they re-post onto their public profiles, people can shape perceptions of their personal identities, their brands. A brand is a combination of unique and defining characteristics that together form a cohesive, manufactured image of a product, company, person, etc.

In many fields of work, developing a personal brand is a major key to success that can help the person gain the respect or admiration of the public or climb the career ladder by impressing and continually satisfying their employers. A person can refine their brand in various ways, including interacting with and reaching out to the public, supporting or denouncing things they do or do not believe in and even expressing their personalities through humor or lack thereof.

Journalism is one profession in which branding is especially crucial and can be the determining factor of someone in the field’s success. Journalists often utilize these social tools to help boost both their ethos to the public as well as their value to corporations that currently employ or could potentially employ them. For journalists, maintaining a specific brand for themselves can boost and strengthen their connection with their viewers, readers and listeners as well as their overall public image.

A fine line exists, though, between the personal side of branding oneself and the strictly business side. Careening toward one of the two sides of the line can prove risky, as getting too personal could potentially ruin their image as a professional, bipartisan journalist but remaining too strict and proper could forge a disconnect between the journalist and their audience that could negatively affect the audience’s trust or interest toward the journalist.

Journalists often respond to this risk by entirely removing both sides from each other by creating and maintaining separate profiles on social media. They often create one profile for their personal expression and a more professional, business-oriented profile to promote their work. This is a good way for journalists to ease the stress of constantly debating whether the content they post is either too personal or too professional for the masses of media consumers.

News organizations use branding to their advantage as well by holding their journalists accountable for their social media usage and often steering them to help promote the company’s larger brand. Corporations succeed in doing this by having their employees regulate the content they put on their page, often telling them to do things such as promoting the corporation’s articles rather than similar articles put out by competitors and including the company’s logos in their profiles.

This increases the amount of pressure on journalists already struggling to find a balance between self-expression and company promotion because journalists are told that their profiles are not just a reflection of their own brand but their employer’s brand as well. Social media as a means of self-branding is a tool that can prove extremely beneficial to journalists trying to promote and express themselves, but a web of red tape and thin lines as well as they struggle to find a suitable balance.

Though the balancing of both personal identities proves challenging for some journalists, it is simply one of the many parts of the job that journalists must deal with now. Once a journalist discovers a balance that works, the good outweighs the bad and social media becomes an invaluable tool, especially for newer journalists trying to make a name for themselves in fast-pace field with a large body of different brands.