Does the Temptation of Selling IP Taint Journalism?

Some feature writers worry that Hollywood's hunger for IP will influence reporting and writing.

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs

Over the past months, I’ve been reporting on the impact of selling the intellectual property of feature articles to Hollywood as a new revenue stream for freelance writers and publications alike. I’ve found that the IP market is influencing journalism in several ways.

Cash-strapped publications are increasingly aggressive in their pursuit of IP for added profit, making up for falling ad rates. Some companies, like Condé Nast and Vox, have built their own in-house entertainment studios to keep IP and simplify the print-to-screen pipeline. And because publications are more aggressively trying to retain IP, freelancers have had to adapt, becoming fluent in contract legalese, working with literary agents to help them fight for fair contracts, and then signing with film and television agents to represent their interests when they get that knock from Hollywood.

Yet there’s a less immediate, more abstract consequence of the IP market. Does the possibility of selling the story as a movie or podcast impact which articles get commissioned, or how the reporting process plays out? Journalists, in an ideal world, are supposed to be both objective and motivated solely by a thirst for the truth. Could having a financial interest in the outcome of a story, in the form of future IP sales and producer credits, taint a journalist’s relationship to their subject?

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Rachel Monroe, a feature writer best known for her true-crime stories for such publications as Esquire and The Atlantic (she also has a book on women and violence, Savage Appetites, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster), recalled being confronted with these questions when a producer approached her with a new story idea. He was hoping Monroe would take the idea to a major magazine — he listed a few possible targets — and turn it into a longform article that he could then adapt into a movie.

These sorts of deals aren’t unheard of — producer David Klawans brought the idea for Argo to Joshuah Bearman, who turned the story into a Wired article that Klawans then made into a movie. More recently, Klawans formed a partnership of sorts with journalist Jeff Maysh. They worked together to produce a Daily Beast article about a McDonalds lottery scam artist that has since been optioned by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon at a whopping $1 million.

But Monroe turned the producer down, she said, uncomfortable with how the incentive of an option might sway her instincts as a writer. “There was some discomfort I felt with the story itself,” she said. “It had to do with the border. [I thought] ok, this guy wants to turn it into a movie. Who gets to be a hero here?”

She had touched on these concerns briefly on Twitter, noting the new ecosystem of IP “creates new incentives for what makes a piece of writing valuable.” What makes a story marketable for Hollywood might not be journalistically ideal.

“It was never implied I wouldn’t have creative control, but I could just see how [the potential deal] would incentivize me to write one kind of story versus another kind of story,” Monroe told Study Hall. More broadly, she noted an emphasis on movie deals has created “a hunger for the story that’s bonkers” — in other words, the most extreme, ridiculous, or compelling narrative possible.

There was something else adding to her discomfort: the producer had already acquired the life rights of the story’s subjects. The purchase of life rights can mean many things depending on the deal, but it generally buys the cooperation of the subject and exclusive access to certain artifacts, plus protection for the producer from defamation lawsuits. In Monroe’s case, the subject was already in on the deal and wanted to see the movie get made.

Monroe felt she was being offered a cut in a money-making scheme of which her journalism was just one part. It might not have been explicitly unethical, or illegal, but it made her uneasy. “The story was like this weird byproduct, a step, but it wasn’t the ultimate end goal, it was in service to this other thing,” she said.

Monroe had to grapple with these complications last year when, shortly after having an article published in a national magazine, the subject was approached by a studio representative and compelled to sign away their life rights, limiting the possibilities of where the story could be optioned. It raised the question of whether a writer should have frank conversations about movie deals with their subjects in advance, and whether they should advise their subjects to be wary about signing away life rights.

“Am I, in a weird way, in business with them, [saying] ‘If we all work together we will possibly get a better movie deal’? Should I have warned the subjects of this article, ‘Don’t sign any deals?’” she wondered. “It makes you start to have these conversations with people about movie deals while you’re also trying to get them to tell you the honest version of their story.

“My approach has been to not do that at all, but I have occasionally received counsel that I should be doing otherwise,” she continued.

Journalist Evan Hughes had a nightmarish run-in with Hollywood a few years back. His highly praised 2014 story for The Atavist Magazine “The Trials of White Boy Rick” was, as he told it on Twitter, initially optioned by Universal but then somehow co-opted by Sony and made into a movie “without pay nor credit” to him. (He declined to elaborate on the ordeal any further).

Still, he doesn’t see Hollywood’s influence on the world of journalism as altogether bad. Like Monroe, he has been approached by producers pitching movie-ready articles, but he turned them down, more because the stories weren’t up his alley than anything else. He doesn’t mind sourcing from producers. “You can get a story idea from anywhere,” he argued. Similarly, there’s always a financial incentive in freelance journalism — you want to tell a good story so that readers will want more and editors will think of you for future commissions.

It does get dicey when life rights are involved. Hughes said he would be hesitant to take on a project in which the subject’s life rights had been acquired and the subject was working alongside the producer. “Is your journalism going to be affected by the fact that you want that person to be happy with it?” he wondered, echoing Monroe. “It’s almost like he’s your business partner at that point more than a source.”

But as for the spectre of Hollywood tainting the writing and reporting process, he said that if anything the influence of screenwriting has been instructional for him, as far as how best to structure a narrative. What he is interested in covering hasn’t changed as a result of Hollywood’s appetite for magazine stories. But he has noticed the lines between Hollywood and prestige journalism blurring, in part due to economic necessity.

“The dollar figures that exist in Hollywood are in a totally different realm than the dollar figures we look at in print and web publishing,” he said. “People are piecing together a career by straddling the line and doing a little bit over here, a little bit over there.” There’s no guidebook for this relatively new territory — each journalist will have to make decisions about straddling that line using their best judgment. But one can see how the situation might end up creating a division like sponsored content — some journalists decide not to risk going over the line at all.

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There’s no reason to think the phenomenon of producers and journalists working together to create movie-ready articles will die out. It makes perfect sense, from a business perspective. And with or without a producer’s involvement, journalists are still writing longform articles with movie deals in mind. That will continue, Hughes pointed out, as long as journalism on its own is so badly compensated. It’s a dilemma: Everyone wants a six-figure option, but nobody wants journalism to be what Hughes called a “waystation to optioning.”

“I think there are people who do that and it’s totally fine, but I wouldn’t want the entire industry to view it that way, because journalism is in itself an end point, I hope,” he said.

June Cross, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism specializing in ethics, takes a strong stance on these questions. She argued the reporting process is corrupted the moment a reporter approaches a story with a movie deal in mind. The possibility will influence how the story is told, whether the writer intends it or not.

“You’re making choices that are already commercially driven. You’re becoming a slave to this whole concept of story, this hero’s journey [where] someone goes through something and overcomes it and comes out triumphant,” Cross said. “You’re already choosing stories of a certain ilk.” At minimum, she suggested discussing the IP situation with a subject upfront when pursuing a story.

But Cross also said that while she and other academics have the luxury of teaching their students to adhere to ideals, the real world is more complicated. It may be that we can’t afford to worry about this kind of narrative contamination. As Cross told me: “The industry is changing and each person may now face a choice between eating and ethics.”

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