With citizen journalism comes a greater scrutiny of not only the press but also the ‘trade’ press. The blog Alarm Clock this morning compains about Business 2.0 stealing a methodology for valuing blog networks without reference to their original thinking. Their post was originally entitled ‘B2.0 Lifts Our Post’ but we’ve noticed they’ve changed the title during the day to ‘B2.0 Influenced By Our Post’ – oooh, someone sent them a stern email, we assume.
While we’re at it – we’re going to mention something we noticed in Wired in December 05’s issue. It looks like Wired have done a Vogue – i.e. blurred the line between editorial and advertising. Here’s the thing: isn’t it funny that Wired does a ‘write up’ on page 78 on a video game that has taken out a 4 page advertising spread in the beginning of the magazine? Chris Anderson, tut tut, where’s the transparency?
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Piers,
I’m confused. Magazines review products all the time that are also advertised in their pages. What’s important is that one is not influenced by the other–that’s why we have “Chinese walls” to ensure that ad team doesn’t know what the edit will be and vice versa. Part of not knowing is that you can’t predict ahead of time when you will in fact have the two in the same issue, as was the case this time. But in such cases we try to avoid any perception of conflict by ensuring that the ad is placed as far from the story as possible to emphacize that the two are unlinked. This is standard practice, and done according to ASME guidelines.
Ads that have their own edit-looking copy are clearly marked “Advertisement” or “Promotion”, as was the case here (I just checked).
Chris
December 1st, 2005 at 2:41 am
Thanks Chris. We appreciate your input. We were just interested and hopefully didn;t sound too accusing – we do flick through some mags and think it’s amazing what they get away with. We only talked about Wired because we care. P
December 1st, 2005 at 3:36 pm