Posts under ‘Ethics’

SF Chronicle: Food bloggers dish up plates of spicy criticism / Formerly formal discipline of reviewing becomes a free-for-all for online amateurs: Just days after opening Senses, his San Francisco bistro, Teo Kridech clicked onto the World Wide Web only to find that his dream business was considered an overnight flop. “Senses is like a […]

Amazingly, the man who concocted the anti-Hillary remix of the old Apple 1984 commercial is proud of himself. After the Huffington Post outed Phil de Vellis, a now-former employee of a consulting firm that has been working for Barack Obama — whose campaign was designed to be the main beneficiary of the ad remix — […]

LA Times: Blogging for dollars raises questions of online ethics. Payments by advertisers to bloggers for writing about their goods, critics say, blur the line between opinion and product placement. This is not a close call. To take money for touting products in a blog and not disclose it — prominently, and in context — […]

Slate’s Jack Shafer tries to unravel “The BALCO mess or travels in the gray areas of confidential source arrangement,” and writes of the San Francisco Chronicle reporters whose source for grand-jury minutes turned out to be a defense attorney: Having found their leaker, the feds dropped the subpoena against the reporters. But a number of […]

The SF Chronicle catches up with a somewhat old story today with a piece called “Creeps beware: Web gives women revenge / Catcall recipients share their stories — and men’s photos” — an article focusing on the way female bloggers are using the HollaBack sites to “post pictures and videos of guys who harass them […]

Edward Wasserman at the Miami Herald, in “Flying high with the Money Honey,” observes: CNBC no longer perceives a difference between journalist and show pony. Bartiromo’s jet-setting isn’t, as the network claims, source development. She isn’t doing legwork on stories. She’s a corporate emissary and brand-enhancement, helping favored companies — many of them CNBC advertisers […]

The Consumerist’s readers have ruled: ‘All I Want For Xmas Is A PSP’ Wins Best Flog 2006.

Rebecca MacKinnon: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Vodaphone display some cojones. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Cisco and others have been getting a lot of heat over the past year for colluding with human rights violations and state censorship in countries like China. Fortunately, three of those four companies have found the wherewithal to do more than just […]

A business-oriented website all but accused the editor of Men’s Health magazine, in a blog posting on Yahoo, of inserting an advertising plug into his copy. Oh, there was a disclaimer of sorts — maybe the blog writer “really loves the product,” suggested Dan Zoll in his posting — but the rest of the piece […]

Earlier this week I posted this piece about video news releases (VNRs) and their undisclosed use by TV “news” programs. I loathe the practice, but worry more about the negative consequences of federal intervention, which some favor, than the good it might do. Diane Farsetta, senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy, one […]