Exposure Isn't Free: What Two Pitches Taught Me About Protecting VEM

Within hours of giving a young man access to my website, it slowed down. Google scores how fast a site loads on a scale of 0 to 100, and vem.media had been sitting at an 87. Now it was a 56. When we went looking for the reason, we found a page I'd never written. It was all about him, and he'd built it himself, on my magazine's website.

He's a content creator with a following in the millions, and he first came to me with a pitch about a veteran he'd met once. I told him I couldn't build a VEM feature on a single meeting. He came back with his own family instead: a grandfather who served, a father who served, and a line in his email I want you to hold onto. "And I genuinely wouldn't want this to be a story about me."

Partway through our interview, the conversation turned to the website. Our Operations and Publishing Manager built vem.media from scratch, and camilledford.com too. He offered to build our landing page, and I told him she was already building it. Then he pitched an idea of his own, a page to introduce the VEM team. "You want me to make it?" he asked. "Just tell me who the partners are, what picture that we could use." He told me he'd help grow VEM's audience using his own and send his followers our way. I believed him. I gave him collaborative access, not my password, and I texted him that my OPM knew about adding him as a partner. 'I trust you,' I wrote.

When we got back on a call later that day, he told me where his time had gone. "Like today, you know, I got hyper focused on working on your website," he said. At one point, he pulled up a tool that was combing through our pages and our sitemap. 'Wow, you're a real nerd,' I told him. "Oh, I'm a big time nerd," he said. Then he cut the interview short. He asked me to email him the rest of my questions so he could answer them in writing, "'cause I get so sidetracked." He'd spent his day on my website, and the story about his own family got whatever time was left.

Over text that day, he sent me an audit of my site and asked, "Can I fix these things?!" I said yes. "Perfect, I'll keep going :)" he wrote. When he sent me the link to the team page, I texted back, 'Good job!' Our OPM had been hesitant about him. She'd done her research, and she wanted him gone. 'People judge me based on what they don't understand about me,' I told her. Hours later, she sent me screenshots of the short bios he'd written for her and me, and of the entire page he'd built to promote himself. He'd put himself on our Meet the Team page, right beside us, and his card opened to that page. His name sat at the top with "Web Development & SEO Strategist" under it. This young woman built our publication from scratch since five teams couldn’t rise to what was needed to welcome partners. He'd been in it for a day, and he gave himself her job.

The rest of the page read like a press kit. It said he supported the magazine's website development and counted our team and profile pages as his work at VEM. It cited a record of his audience that put his views in the billions. It said a national fundraising platform had ranked him among its top ten creators of the year, that he'd been up for another award after that, and that a university archive keeps a collection of his work. There was even a section on why supporting veterans was personal to him, built on the same father and grandfather he'd pitched me for his feature, and a line stating that editorial decisions at VEM were still mine, on a page I never asked for. The photos were heavy and uncompressed, and they slowed the whole site down. The man who promised to send his audience to VEM had used VEM to tell Google about himself. It was a partnership where only one of us stood to gain.

Operations Manager revoked his access within seconds, deleted his page, and restored everything he'd touched. Then she kept going, and she took the site further than it had ever been. By the next check, vem.media scored a 92, faster than it was before he ever got in. I apologized to her. I told her I'd never add a member to her team again, and that she's in full control of who she works with. Then I texted him that I knew what he'd done, that she had confirmed it, and I told him to take care. Two days later, he emailed me his answers to the rest of my interview questions anyway. He still wanted in. He didn't want this to be a story about him. Then he built one, a whole page on my website with his name at the top.

The Resume That Didn't Add Up

Around the same time, another pitch landed in my inbox. A man wrote that he'd served nearly three decades across two branches and had built a business after he hung up the uniform. He wanted a feature. I told him I was open to it, with the focus on his service and his transition into business, and I asked him to send me a little background. He sent me the link to his company's website.

The website told me about the product. It didn't tell me about the man. There was no rank, no job, no unit, no deployments, and no dates. So, before we went any further, I wrote back and explained how VEM works. 'Our features are independent journalism, not promotional pieces for businesses or products.' I sent him two of our stories so he could see the kind of reporting we do. He wrote back that he understood and appreciated the approach, and we went back and forth on a time to talk.

Before we locked in the interview, I asked for more. 'I understand that you served for 27 years, but I don't yet have enough information about your military career or your experiences after service to identify the story I would be pursuing,' I wrote. I asked for a biography or resume with his service timeline and major assignments. I'd also noticed that his company's website and a local news piece named the founder by a different first name than the one he signed his emails with, so I asked about that, too. He told me he goes by his middle name, and that his family and friends each call him something different.

Then the resume came. It read like it had been pulled together in a hurry from a template, with the same stock bullet points you could find on anybody's, and even the formatting was off. It listed more than a decade in one branch, a gap of several years, and then service in a second branch that ran through to "current." His emails described his service as finished. So, I did the math. His first branch ran more than 13 years. His second started about five years after that and, according to the resume, never ended. Add those together, and he'd be past 33 years of service, not the 27 he told me. If he really stopped at 27, he would've been out around 2020, and the resume had no business saying "current." Those two things can't both be true.

I had questions ready for our call, and I never used them. When the facts a source gives me don't agree with each other, I can't put them in front of you, and I won't spend an hour asking a man about a career I can't confirm he had. I decided not to interview him. I don't believe he served the way he said he did. In this community, we know what that's called, and we don't give it a platform.

Why I'm Telling You This

Neither man's name is in this entry, and it won't be. This isn't about them. It's about what happens behind the scenes before a story ever reaches you. People pitch VEM every week, and some of them come with something to gain. They want the credibility a veteran magazine carries, and they're willing to borrow it. VEM's credibility is not something people get to borrow for their own benefit. From here on, if a pitch leads with a business and says little about service, I ask for the bio before I agree to anything.

Exposure is the oldest offer in this business. Somebody with a bigger platform says they'll lift you up, and all you have to do is open the door. I opened it once this week, and I learned what it costs. Exposure isn't free. Somebody always pays for it, and as long as I'm editing this magazine, it won't be you.

VEM Resources

Request Military Service Records (VA) | https://www.va.gov/records/get-military-service-records/

The VA's guide to requesting a DD214 and other service records from the National Archives.

National Archives Veterans' Service Records | https://www.archives.gov/veterans/military-service-records

Where veterans and next of kin can request free copies of the DD Form 214 and other military records.

Google PageSpeed Insights | https://pagespeed.web.dev/

A free Google tool that scores how fast any web page loads on mobile and desktop.