Center for Citizen Media

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 — is not ethical. No amount of thumb-sucking justifications can change that.

The lead anecdote in the LA Times story hints at how pernicious this situation has become.

The story cites a blogger who takes this kind of compensation. In a posting about a new movie, the blogger praises the picture and the studio. Nowhere in the posting is there the slightest hint that the blogger has been paid for this posting.

The disclosure, such as it is, comes on another page on the site, where the blogger says, in part:

This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.

The compensation influencing content “may or may not be identified”? Good grief.

Then the blogger says:

The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers’ own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

Let’s unpack some of this.

First the blogger says the revenue may influence the content. Then she says the content is her honest opinions. That sounds contradictory, but let’s assume for the moment it’s true.

Even if it is true, there is absolutely no reason for a reader of this blog to believe it. In fact, there is every reason not to believe it. The lack of genuine transparency is blatant, and it makes mistrust the only rational reaction.

Equally disappointing is the rationale from Tim Draper, a Silicon Valley investor in the company paying the blogger. The story reveals his indifference to the ethical issue, or lack of understanding of its importance:

“This is a new way of looking at advertising,” Draper said.

Draper likened sponsored blogging to product placement in movies: “You put an ad inside the text and it’s more of a subtle way of advertising. It doesn’t take away from the blogger.”

In Draper’s universe, apparently, everything that’s published is entertainment. Would he be so indifferent if newspapers did product placement in their news columns?

(Wow, maybe there’s a great idea for a new business model for the newspaper industry! The current one is disintegrating, after all.)

The bloggers obviously don’t consider themselves journalists. But they are pretending to do something that resembles journalism. So they don’t get a pass from me. They shouldn’t get one from any of their readers.

I consider the companies in this business — the ones paying the bloggers — repellent. They are media polluters.

PayPerPost, the “leader” in this field, made one step in a positive direction — after being correctly pilloried for its initial stance, which said, essentially, “It’s entirely up to the blogger” — by insisting on some disclosure. But it made the disclosure almost meaningless by giving blogger the choice of whether to make the disclosures clear, in the individual posts, or, as in the case of the blogger in the story, obfuscated in a statement that leaves readers guessing.

If these companies insisted on full, in-context disclosure, they’d reduce the “value” of what they promote. Maybe that’s why they don’t.

In the end, despite the contempt we should feel for the companies brokering this stuff, it’s the bloggers who should be looking in the mirror.

I’ll leave the last word to Jason Calacanis, who’s quoted in the LA Times article. He said, “No one with any level of ethics would get involved with these clowns.”

It’s called “triangle.com community sharing,” operated by the Raleigh (North Carolina) News & Observer. It doesn’t resemble the newspaper at all, which is smart.

Broadcasting & Cable: C-SPAN Loosens Copyright for Some Content Online. C-SPAN is loosening its copyright policy on some material for online use, saying it wants to expand citizens’ access to online video of congressional hearings, White House activities, and other government-sponsored events.

Progress, but C-SPAN’s behavior has been a bit obnoxious, and the proof will be in the actual policies it puts forward.

The network had been claiming it owned the material it showed from floor debates, which are captured by government cameras, not C-SPAN’s — a blatant misuse of copyright, given that nothing from the federal government can be copyrighted.

And it’s good business, perhaps, but lousy citizenship given C-SPAN’s nonprofit status and existence due to government-granted monopolies, that the network was copyrighting the tapes it made at committee hearings.

What we need, of course, is the widespread of cameras inside all committee rooms. Everything should be archived at the least, and even better web-cast as it’s occurring. The public pays for these folks to make laws and exercise oversight; we should have access, unfettered access, to what they do.

If this is true — a report that “France bans citizen journalists from reporting violence” — then the French lawmakers have well and fully lost all grip on reality.

David Weinberger is blogging the daylights (if that’s the correct cliche under the circumstances) out of the Freedom to Connect conference.

That’s the name of this conference on April 26 in Los Angeles.

We’ve just posted “Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement” — a report that looks at how traditional media organizations are starting to involve their audiences in the journalism process.

Lisa Williams of Placeblogger and H2otown fame did the heavy lifting for this report, which will evolve as we learn more.

Here’s the executive summary:

As traditional journalism organizations move onto the Web, they are learning to do more than re-publish the work they’ve printed or broadcast. The first forays into conversational journalism were blogs written by staff members, a genre now so widespread that it’s getting difficult to find a news organization without staff blogs.

Less common, but becoming more so, is giving the audience an opportunity to comment on the journalism on the organization’s own website. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasters using this technique have done so gingerly, for the most part, because they’ve worried that comments could (and some have) turn into a free-for-all that annoys readers instead of generating useful conversations.

A very few have tried experiments such as wikis, web pages that anyone can edit. (In one famous debacle, the Los Angeles Times abandoned a wiki editorial that collapsed largely due to the newspaper’s mismanagement of the experiment.)

This report looks at the first generation of traditional-media innovators in the arena of community engagement: bringing the community into the journalism itself, beyond blogs and comments.

What They’re Doing

There appear to be four primary approaches to opening the newsgathering process to “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.”1

* “User generated content” (UGC): People are encouraged to post their own material, such as stories, photos and event listings.
* Blog hub: Participants are able to submit stories, photos, and event listings, but they get their own weblog with a unique Web address on the news organization’s site.
* Community hub: Often incorporating the elements above, these sites also offer social networking — connecting participants to each other.
* Newsroom transparency: The news organization opens a window into its news-production process, helping the audience to understand — and weigh in on — what the editorial staff is doing.

Why They’re Doing It

News organizations have many motives for these moves. Some are mostly financial. But there are valid journalistic reasons as well.

* As traditional news organizations lose audience and advertising, growing an online audience is essential, and audience participation is essential.
* News organizations believe they can save money through user-generated content. (We consider this more wishful thinking than anything else.)
* Bringing the audience — the community — into the process has enormous value for the journalism itself. In particular, the community will be better informed, and the news organization’s ties to the community will be reinforced.

What Works

* Success is not highly correlated with large technology expenditures or major shifts in staffing. It takes patience, follow-through, and iterative experimentation
* Sites that blend the contributions of professionals and community members were more successful than those that didn’t, in part because having new content, consistently and from day one, was so important.
* Formal and informal social networking – through profiles, comments, and unique pages featuring the contributions of a single user – helped communities thrive by rewarding peer-to-peer interaction and enabling users to develop a track record of contributions visible to staffers and other community members.

Recommendations

* Experiment and take risks. Make risk-taking part of the newsroom and business cultures of the organization.
* Make technological flexibility a priority. Favor experimentation and iteration over roadmaps and grand strategy.
* Approach community building with confidence, teamwork, and appropriate expectations.

Washington Post: Buffett Pessimistic About Newspapers. “Simply put, if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the Internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed.”

It’s a sobering assessment from the world’s most famous investor.

Here’s his full letter to shareholders.

(Note: I’m a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder, as well as a shareholder in several newspaper companies.)

The Freedom to Connect conference starts tomorrow, and one of the speakers may sound a bit unlikely. The keynoter will be Jim Douglas, governor of Vermont.

Actually, his presence at the suburban Washington meeting makes a lot of sense. As Tom Evslin (a Vermonter who’s had some influence in this regard) notes on his blog, Vermont is moving toward becoming a true “e-state” in the best sense of the word, and Douglas, a Republican, is leading the charge.

This initiative could set a real precedent, whether by success or failure. Let’s hope it’s not the latter.

Brendan Greeley reports “Open Source Radio’s Shiny New MacArthur Grant” for

developing tools at Open Source that are going to be useful in the future to a lot of people. People in public radio, people in public television, people tiptoeing toward that fantastic beast we’re beginning to call “public media.”

Open Source Radio is a first-rate example of where media can go. Congrats to the team.