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Saturday, June 23, 2007
Shifting sands 
| | Traditional journalism tries to kep a "Chinese wall" between editorial and advertising. And, since advertising happens on the publishing "side", the wall separates editorial from both publishing and advertising. |
| | For as long as I've been around journalism, that "wall" has been understood to stand for a barrier on influence. Professionals on either side of the wall might be able to see and hear what the other side is up to; but — at least on the editorial side — they do their best not to influenced by it. |
| | For bloggers who publish advertising, Chinese walls are internal. All we can do as readers is trust that the writers are not compromised by the money they take for advertising — or, we now learn, for copy-editing their advertising. Mike Arrington explains: |
| | The ads in question are a staple of FM Publishing - a standard ad unit contains a quote by the publisher saying something about something. It isn't a direct endorsement. Rather, it¹s usually an answer to some lame slogan created by the adveriser. It makes the ad more personal and has a higher click through rate, or so we've been told. In the case of the Microsoft ad, we were quoted how we had become "people ready," whatever that means. See our answer and some of the others here (I think it will be hard to find this text controversial, or anything other then extremely boring). We do these all the time...generally FM suggests some language and we approve or tweak it to make it less lame. The ads go up, we get paid. This has been going on for months and months - at least since the summer of 2006. It's nothing new. It's text in an ad box. I think people are pretty aware of what that means...which is nothing. |
| | Actually, before I read what Mike wrote here (and the post's comments) I didn't know what "FM" was. (It's Federated Media.) I still don't know exactly what ads Mike is talking about, or the full nature of the relationship between his sites and Federated Media. I go out of my way not to look at ads in any case. Anyway, I'm not sure that's what matters. What matters is that we're hearing a publisher/editor say he and his staff copy-edit the advertising that pays for their publications. |
| | Mike details how the Chinese wall pretty much doesn't exist in this form of journalism, much as it doesn't exist at a small town newspaper where the editor is the publisher and might even write copy and do layout for the ads. Readers know the editor/publisher, including his or her proclivities and prejudices, and just hope that the editor hat isn't just a painted-over advertising hat. |
| | It would have been cool if Mike just told us that we can trust him. But he went elsewhere with his post: |
| | Even Dave Winer threw a few logs on the fire, while acknowledging that Valleywag is generally full of shit. |
| | So here¹s my position on all of this: Go pound sand. People understand that if there¹s text in an ad box, someone is paying for it to be there. |
| | The main thing I¹m pissed off about right now is that they pulled all the ads, which mean we¹re taking a revenue hit. We¹re running a business here, and have payroll to make. We run ads to make that payroll. Those ads have now been pulled. |
| | The question isn't whether advertisers are paying for text in a box. It's whether they're they're also buying kinder treatment in editorial postings. We need to hear that. Not to be told where to go. |
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