The Intersection of Blogs and Public Relations
I don’t presume to write the rules for other bloggers; speaking only for myself, I have pledged, and continue to do so, to reveal my source when I quote something verbatim. In other words, if you read something here, it’s my opinion, or it’s clearly marked otherwise. The New York Times started a bit of a firestorm recently with a piece on Wal-Mart and their outreach effort to bloggers (full disclosure: I have not been contacted by Wal-Mart).
I’ve got no problem with outreach efforts – in fact, I think they’re a great idea. If I were contacted by Wal-Mart, or any company, with a set of talking points, I would give them careful consideration – as I would if I were contacted by one of the many groups opposed to Wal-Mart, or sent a tip from a reader by e-mail. I would not post the talking points as is, however, unless the attribution was made clear. On the other hand, if a talking point matched my own viewpoint, or if research convinced me it was right, I might incorporate a variation of it into a piece of my own composition.
As Howard Kurtz points out in this comprehensive roundup:
More interesting, though, is how Michael Barbaro’s Times story paints the practice by Wal-Mart and others as faintly disreputable, when you could argue that it’s just classic PR, no different than trying to find the right newspaper reporter (or radio talker or cable host) in an effort to get a fair shake.
It’s a very different story, obviously, if a blogger runs the corporate spin verbatim, without disclosing the source, just as it would be for a garden-variety reporter to reprint a handout. Whether bloggers are doing that remains in dispute.
What’s not in dispute is that what was once dismissed as a pajama-clad brigade is becoming increasingly influential, to the point that giant companies have to worry about what they say. Dell got tarnished, for example, when it dealt shabbily with Jeff Jarvis over his lemon of a laptop. And as I reported the other day, the Pentagon has created a unit to seek good coverage and knock down bad coverage among bloggers.
The better bloggers are going to have to figure out their own standards for dealing with corporate and political flacks, and those that blindly carry water for outside groups will probably lose credibility over time. But I expect them to be in the minority.
You won’t ever have a problem here on that score. When you read Decision ‘08, you can be sure the opinions expressed are my own – when they’re right, and when they’re wrong (hey, it could happen, I guess)…
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