Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Bloggers Urge That People They Support Advertise on Their Sites:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_04_05-2009_04_11.shtml#1239251725
[1]The Plum Line, Greg Sargent's blog on the Washington Post's
whorunsgov.com, reports:
Some of the leading liberal bloggers are privately furious with the
major progressive groups -- and in some cases, the Democratic Party
committees -- for failing to spend money advertising on their
sites, even as these groups constantly ask the bloggers for free
assistance in driving their message.
The post then goes on to give more details, including this quote from
a blogger: �They come to us, expecting us to give them free publicity,
and we do, but it�s not a two way street. They won�t do anything in
return. They�re not advertising with us. They�re not offering
fellowships. They�re not doing anything to help financially, and
people are growing increasingly resentful.�
I haven't thought hard about this subject; and I realize that it's
easy for me to be cavalier about advertising revenue, since my
academic day job lets me blog without worrying about ad income. But
still I wonder whether it's quite right for authors who publish their
own opinion and news commentary to demand a "two way street" in which
the authors get advertising money from the people they praise.
Now some amount of blogger commentary about people who pay them money
is likely inevitable. Many bloggers work at think tanks, and they may
report on their employer's work product, thus helping promote the
employer. I'm a part-part-part-time Academic Affiliate with the Mayer
Brown LLP firm, and I occasionally blog about Mayer's cases. That, I
think, can generally be dealt with by notes explaining the possible
conflict of interest. (For instance, I always note, when I blog about
a case that I know to be one of Mayer's, that I have an affiliation
with Mayer.)
But if an ostensibly independent blogger has a general pattern of
demanding advertising -- even indirectly, rather than in some personal
communication -- from institutions in exchange for publicizing the
institutions' work, that sort of relationship strike me as harder to
disclose in any transparent way. And my sense is that historically
this sort of deal has been seen as not entirely kosher in the
newspaper business, or for that matter in the opinion magazine
business. Naturally, readers expect that an opinion magazine would
have editorial biases. But I don't think they expect that the opinion
magazine would be making advertising dollars from positive coverage
(or "free publicity") that it provides to various organizations.
On the other hand, perhaps a different model is needed for small blogs
that may need advertising income to stay afloat; or perhaps some
reasonable disclosure system would suffice to take care of any
possible problems here; or perhaps I'm missing something, and there
really aren't likely to be any problems. I just wanted to tentatively
express my thoughts on the subject, and hear our readers' thoughts in
return.
References
1.
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/blogosphere/big-liberal-bloggers-tee-off-on-progressive-groups-for-not-sharing-ad-wealth/
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