Road Trip!
Post-Trip Review: Astroturf
Alakazam!
Note: This is the tenth in a series of posts describing my effort to get letters published in newspapers in every state and territory of the U.S.A. You can read the whole series here.
As I continued on my virtual road trip, I enjoyed visits to so many communities across the U.S. If you ever want to get a feel for the country and its people, I highly recommend starting by seeking out newspapers in many towns, then using Google Maps and Wikipedia to explore the geography and the history of each area. The reading and research were so much fun that I often had to force myself to stop reading and get back to writing letters.
My journey also gave me something that I think even many long-time journalists lack: awareness of the differences and similarities in opinion pages all over the country. I’m sure many journalists read several major newspapers, but how many of them regularly peruse dozens of small newspapers from every region of the country?
I found not only similarities, but outright duplication of letters. Remember how in first trying to go from my local newspaper to the big statewide news outlet in Alabama, I was appalled to discover that I had gotten the same letter published in both places at the same time, and I thought that was a bad thing? And then I realized: most editors don’t care about simultaneous submissions, because they mainly care about what goes on in their immediate circulation area.
Well, simultaneous submissions by one writer are one thing, but something I noticed that many editors may not know about is mass, nationwide submission of identical letters, but with different author names and home addresses. This, my friends is astroturfing. Astroturfing as it pertains to writing is “the deceptive practice of presenting an orchestrated marketing or public relations campaign in the guise of unsolicited comments from members of the public.” Thanks to Oxford Languages via Google for that definition.
I don’t mean that experienced editors don’t know about astroturfing in general. But unless they read dozens of newspapers, they might not realize that the letter that they just published is A-number-one turf.
Since I was not only studying local issues in many papers, but also reading letters in their opinion pages, from April through June—which encompasses Earth Day and Memorial Day and the approach to the Fourth of July—I started seeing this phrase over and over near the tops of letters in many different papers: “…we have reduced our carbon footprint by curtailing travel and our thermostat. We recycle. But we can do so much more by cutting our consumption of animal meat and milk products. Yes, that.”
Now, depending on the holiday at which it was aimed, some of the text before and after that phrase varied. But the list of virtuous habits and the “Yes, that,” were always there, followed by more supporting arguments for eliminating meat from one’s diet. While the ideas expressed in the letter were standard pro-vegan fare, the identical phrasing could not be an accident. These letters all came from one author or organization.
Each of these nearly-identical letters was signed by a different author from a different town—a town in or near the town where the newspaper originated.
Why…why…why…that’s downright evil! Look at these folks, abusing the editorial pages by submitting work in multiple places under false pretenses! Why, they might even all be from the same person, who is just blithely lying about his/her name and home address! That’s…that’s…oh.
That’s a variation on my own individual road trip.
And it’s damned effective. I did a search on the key phrases from that anti-meat letter and got hundreds of hits. I saved off just over a dozen examples to prove what I am saying here.
I don’t know how those letters are created and submitted. It could be the work of one person or a small group doing the kind of thing that I was doing. I know how much work is involved in submitting one letter to one newspaper, keeping within the guidelines and rephrasing the letter as needed to suit a different holiday or occasion, and for local consumption if there are any location details. You know, like in Mad Libs. Therefore, I think it is much more likely that some nationwide organization wrote a template for the letter and then asked their membership to submit it in their own names to their local newspapers. If you have hundreds or maybe even thousands of people doing that, and just a small percentage of them get the letter published, you can cover the country in very short order.
I then realized that what I viewed as my heroic individual effort to gain nationwide publication, using a variety of techniques to appeal to local editors, is something that advocacy groups must do all the time as a crowd-sourced effort. While their motives differed from mine, they were accomplishing my nationwide goal in just a matter of days! And I had only detected one clear example of an astroturfing campaign, thanks to the range of my newspaper reading. I’ll bet that kind of thing goes on all the time.
The existence of astroturf campaigns featuring letters signed by different authors with different and possibly fictional addresses does not make my lying about my address any less of a lie, nor does it justify it. But it does demonstrate that the practice is widespread. I have a strong suspicion, wholly unsupported by any research, that if an editor agrees with the message in an astroturf letter, he would publish it even if he knew it was astroturf.
Am I saying that editors enforce rules capriciously based on the content of letters?
Yes, that.
Now, I had independently come up with my own methods of making a letter appealing in many locales, chiefly by using the Mad Libs method with a letter whose basic theme might have wide appeal. Niceness Bombs in various flavors were the chief example of that, and the mail-order alcohol letters and the wind farm letters had also demonstrated the potential in a small way. But these anti-meat astroturf folks were obviously striking a nerve with editors all over the country; whether they were vegans or not, the editors must have enjoyed the way the letter invoked civic virtue by touching on energy conservation and other swell issues that editors like to promote. The astroturf crew also had timed their letters to coincide with holidays and events that involve outdoor activities, including picnics and cookouts.
Oh, those mad, clever dickies.
So, inspired by the idea of targeting holidays or major events, and also by the thought of appealing directly to the emotional or political predilections of editors, I looked at my calendar and what did I see coming up?
Mothers’ Day.
And hot on its heels: Fathers’ Day.
Thus was born a plan that would eventually gain me publication in nearly 20 new states: tug at them there editorial heart strings by invoking memories of Mom and Dad.
And not just any mom and dad. I would make “my” parents into old-school newspaper folk, and “myself” into a child raised in an ink-stained home where everyone knew the newspaper lingo and family life was lived around the publication schedule.
Yes, that!
My Mom, the Ink-Stained Wretch
First up was Mothers’ Day. It helped that I had worked in IT for a major newspaper, and that the route from my office to the cafeteria took me through the press room where I conversed with pressmen and women. I also supported computer users in the ad layout and prepress departments. While I didn’t work there long enough to become an expert, I was able to write fairly convincingly for a few paragraphs as the child of a newspaper person.
As it appeared in the Black Hills Pioneer.
As it appeared in the Yuma Sun. Notice the restaurant-themed niceness bomb that is the first letter on this page. And then there’s a road-crew-themed niceness bomb. I would think those are genuine, except for what I now know about a) the devious astroturf organizations; and b) my own devious self. Could it be that the entire opinion page of every paper is full of nothing but advocacy astroturf and ink-hungry writers from other towns?
As it appeared in the Juneau Empire.
As it appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Here, the letter was read by a retired pressman for this very newspaper, and he was moved to comment.
As it appeared in the Buffalo News.
As it appeared in the News-Gazette.
As it appeared in the Post and Courier. My letter ran under another letter with the headline, “No Honor in Lies.” Preach!
This letter succeeded almost too well and caused several problems. For one thing, I usually submitted a letter to multiple newspapers in each target state, and with my usual rate of acceptance there was little chance of editors in neighboring or overlapping circulation areas seeing the same letter in print. This one exploded, though, so after some instant positive feedback I stopped submitting it. It was getting into some fairly large newspapers, and I didn’t want the editor of a small local paper to run it but then see it in the nearest big-city paper. Also, given the subject matter, there was a good chance that editors would share this letter with colleagues at other newspapers. How long before some of them noticed that the same letter was being submitted to all of their papers, all with my name but each one giving me a different home town?
I was probably more sensitive to simultaneous submissions than they would have been. I mean, hell, that anti-meat letter was appearing in every paper in some states. But still, I wanted to make minor local splashes but not bring down my whole letter-writing enterprise.
The other problem was that editors didn’t just assign a junior clerk to email me to verify this letter; they wanted to talk to me personally about it! I received more phone calls from editors over this letter than any other. And they were very emotional about it. I think some of them saw their parents in the letter, but more often they saw themselves as the ink-stained parent. Combining sentimentality over Mother and sentimentality over one’s profession had quite an impact.
I was excited by the response but I also wanted to tread carefully. I had to return their emotion in our chats—I could not possibly let on that it was all a clever, astroturf-inspired ploy and that the letter was pure fiction. And so I found myself on lengthy phone calls with editors, waxing ever more poetic about good old Mom and her hard-charging career as an editor.
Add to this the fact that my own actual mom, whose career had been in government, was aware of these doings and was even willing, if called upon, to play the part of ink-stained mom if anyone wanted to double-confirm my story! I would not allow that. I did not want to make a liar out of my mom, plus which I don’t think she could have faked her way through a conversation with a real editor.
One editor asked about my mom’s whereabouts. I said that she lived in a retirement home near Tampa Bay. Soon thereafter, that same editor called me back and said that she had shared my letter with a news producer in Tampa, and the station was interested in interviewing my mom for a Mothers’ Day segment featuring retired professionals. Lord have mercy! Thinking quickly, I told her that Mom (who actually lives a mile from my home—nowhere near Florida—and who would probably gab all day to a news camera), was extremely publicity-shy and would not want to be seen or heard on television.
Dodged that bullet.
But then another bullet zinged in: the editor of the Baltimore Sun commiserated over my mother’s passing. My letter didn’t say she was deceased, but I guess it reads like a eulogy. Rather than accepting his condolences I stupidly said, “Oh, she’s alive and kicking!” He then offered to revise the letter to make it clear that she was not deceased. Rather than let an editor waste his time clarifying the status of my fictional mom, and possibly fouling up my presentation with his own wording, I revised it myself.
As it appeared in the Baltimore Sun. She’s alive! Alive, I tell you! And a director at her bridge club. What the hell, might as well go all in. My real mom plays Scrabble, not bridge.
Oy vey. This letter, it was killing me.
My Dad, the Other Ink-Stained Wretch
Next up: Dad.
Armed with what I had learned from the Mothers’ Day letter, I wrote an equally-gripping one for Fathers’ Day. This time I made it clear that my dad was deceased. My actual dad is, in fact, deceased; but it was important to make my fictional newspaper dad deceased so that I could more easily deflect interview requests from sentimental editors and their pals in the television industry. I could not set another fictional personage loose upon the earth.
As it turned out, this letter received many enthusiastic emails from editors and was published even more widely than the mom version, but I didn’t get any phone calls from editors. This proves what all dads know: Mom gets most of the goodies on her day, and Dad gets more perfunctory (but nice) leftover feelings.
I was going for a Field of Dreams atmosphere with this letter, which I achieved in subtle fashion by outright framing my story as a news industry version of Field of Dreams. That flick is emotional catnip for sons and fathers everywhere, in every profession. In a longer work of fiction I would not try to inspire an emotional response in the reader by baldly referring to a well-loved film, though I suppose one could write an entertaining story that consisted of nothing but that type of reference, one after the other. But it was a very useful technique for this type of seemingly personal writing.
As it appeared in the Ottumwa Courier.
As it appeared in the Greeley Tribune.
As it appeared in the Rutland Herald.
As it appeared in the Leader-Telegram.
As it appeared in the Lowell Sun.
As it appeared in the Bonner County Daily Bee. What ho! Someone got a library-themed niceness bomb published on the same page.
As it appeared in the News-Review.
As it appeared in the Bay to Bay News.
As it appeared in the Press of Atlantic City.
As it appeared in the Las Cruces Sun News.
As it appeared in the Times-Tribune.
With those two astroturf-inspired successes, I checked the calendar and realized that I had better get on the stick and come up with something irresistible for the Fourth of July. How about memories of brothers and sisters at the ol’ swimmin’ hole? Or perhaps a hardy band of paperboys rushing to complete their deliveries so they could engage in hijinks with fireworks?
I had seven more states and two more territories to go, so I set about working up an irresistible roll of Americana-themed astroturf.
But then, two mild, unobtrusive letters that I had submitted weeks before came on strong and ran the table and my journey was suddenly complete. I’ll tell you about those letters in my next post.
Boing!