The PRSA Silicon Valley panel on online ethics for journalists and PR professionals, rescheduled from September, is coming up: it’s scheduled for October 30, 8-9:30 am at the offices of Cooley Godward Kronish in Palo Alto.
If you can make it, I hope you will join us. Here’s the reg form and here’s the description and the panel:
Navigating Uncharted Waters: How The Internet is Changing PR and Media Ethics
The rise of bloggers and other Internet-based social media, are roiling both the PR industry and the media. In the process, new ethical questions are emerging regarding how the Internet is changing the traditional roles of both journalists and PR professionals. Do online journalists adhere to the same ethical standards as their colleagues in traditional media? Do PR professionals have heightened ethical obligations when communicating directly with the public through blogs and other social media? What standards are emerging and which are still open for debate? We will hear from a panel of media and PR experts and probe ethical issues through real-world case studies.
Confirmed Panelists:
Jerry Ceppos, former Executive Editor, SJ Mercury News; currently a fellow in media ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
Tom Formeski, editor, SiliconValleyWatcher.com
Jon Greer, media trainer and editor, 21stCenturyMediaRelations.com
Joel Postman, EVP, Eastwick Communications
The Wall Street Journal uncovered another form of blogola in this weekend’s paper — restaurants handing out free meals in return for hoped-for good coverage from food bloggers and posters on consumer-oriented sites like Yelp.
An excerpt:
Dine, a contemporary American restaurant in Chicago, has been open for less than two years. But on one popular Web site, it is already rated half a star shy of Charlie Trotter’s.
How did Dine garner such favorable reviews? One thing that probably didn’t hurt: It fed many of the reviewers free. Last August, Dine spent about $1,500 on an event for members of Yelp, a Web site where consumers post reviews and rate restaurants. The nearly 100 members were treated to an open bar, duck roulade appetizers and red velvet cupcakes for dessert. As a bonus, they all received certificates for discounts on subsequent meals. The result: a torrent of favorable reviews on Yelp. Most reviewers mentioned that they attended a Yelp event, though few highlighted that the food and drink was free.
“I think if I was picking up the tab I wouldn’t enjoy it as much,” says Leigh Kelsey, a 28-year-old Chicago file clerk at a law firm who attended the event and posted positive comments on Yelp. A spokeswoman for Dine says attendees were not required to write reviews of any nature, positive or negative.
As online food sites become increasingly influential in the restaurant business, chefs and owners are plying bloggers with free meals to get good write-ups. Some are also posting favorable reviews about themselves on popular Web sites or becoming Internet scribes.
I think it’s safe to say at this point that the train has left the station on this subject. We will be seeing lots more versions of blogola, and fewer and fewer reasons why PR has to adhere to old media’s strict standards.
This is not de facto a bad thing. PR’s job is to influence the media. The media is changing, so PR has little choice but to change with it. Over time, media consumers will have to decide how important it is for their chosen media to aspire to a certain level of ethical behavior in gathering and reporting information. If media consumers don’t care about lax ethics, in other words, if media companies can make money without adhering to what had been thought of as appropriate ethical standards, then that is where we will end up, and PR will have to adapt. Simple as that.
We’ve set a new date for the online ethics panel referenced below. It will be Oct. 30 at Cooley Godward Kronish in Palo Alto. Click here for all the details.
More on the issue of blogola and the ethical questions it raises for PR:
In searching around, I’ve found a few attempts by journalistic organizations to articulate ethical standards for journo-bloggers. Here are the links:
- CyberJournalist.net: A Bloggers Code of Ethics
- USC’s Annenberg School, Online Journalism Review: What are the ethics of online journalism?
- Poynter Institute: Online Ethics Guidelines: The Wiki
These are all valid attempts to assert some sense of ethical order in the otherwise unruly online world. The problem is that they are all rooted in traditional journalism’s values, mores and, well, traditions. Will bloggers who never spent a day in journalism school, who never spent a day in a media newsroom, yet who command audiences and attention online, subject themselves to these guidelines? And if not, what is PR’s obligation to adhere to these guidelines if influential new media “journalists” do not?
Or to ask the question more broadly, what are PR’s opportunity and challenges in a world in which some influential journalists adhere to strict ethical guidelines while others follow virtually no guidelines at all?
I’m fast coming to the conclusion that blogola — giving bloggers the use of valuable stuff (like Nikon cameras) or exclusive access (like on-set access to a TV show) — is not PR’s problem.
I think Strumpette makes some spot-on points about the seaminess of the practice, but really, is it PR’s job to establish ethical standards for journalists, bloggers or anyone other than themselves? In other words, if the emerging reality is that there are influential communicators who adhere to lax ethical standards (or who simply don’t buy into the rigid standards set by other in another place and time under other circumstances), and that PR can leverage this reality to the benefit of our clients, why shouldn’t we?
In reaction to the extremely rigid ethical standards of the mainstream media, PRSA established its own very strict policy governing thing like blogola. From PRSA’s Ethic Policy:
A member [of PRSA] shall:
Preserve the free flow of unprejudiced information when giving or receiving gifts by ensuring that gifts are nominal, legal, and infrequent.
Example of Improper Conduct Under this Provision: A member representing a ski manufacturer gives a pair of expensive racing skis to a sports magazine columnist, to influence the columnist to write favorable articles about the product.
But this policy was adopted when the mainstream media dominated. I’m old enough to remember the before/after moment when MSM ethics became this strict — it was an aftershock of the Watergate period. Prior to Watergate, PR showered the media with gifts and prizes. [I experienced this first-hand as the son of a NY-based journalist who came home all the time with free stuff, until it abruptly stopped. And he would be the last to even suggest that it compromised his ethics -- it was just how things were done]. After Watergate, everything got much tighter, and it became improper for MSM journalists to accept anything but the most nominal gift.
So naturally, since the MSM is the constituency the PRSA can least afford to offend, the group adopted guidelines that hewed to the media’s norms.
But that was then. This is the new era, when anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can become an influencer and essentially, a member of the media. So it’s time for PR to rethink its ethics policies as well.
In the rethinking, a few things are obvious:
- There no point shoving it in the face of the MSM — we must still align our ethics with theirs when dealing with them
- There’s little to be gained by announcing “we’ve opened the spigot” for journo-bloggers who don’t buy in to the MSM’s ethics standards
- It’s still appropriate for PR to adopt an air of, shall we say, cultured innocence (“what me, try to buy your affections? I would never think of such a thing”). In that sense, MWW’s public statement about blogola was spot-on as well
- Establishing standards for journo-bloggers and the PR pros seeking to influence them won’t be easy. Check out the reaction to Tim O’Reilly’s attempt to suggest a Bloggers Code of Conduct merely for how bloggers treat people (he doesn’t get into the question of compromising your integrity by accepting gifts in return for a write-up)
It took the better part of 100 years for the MSM to evolve to its current state of ethical standards. Even allowing for Internet time, it’s going to take years if not decades for a set of blogger ethical standards to emerge. PR should definitely be part of the discussion and should develop ethical standards for the industry that reflect the changing reality. But in the meantime, PR doesn’t need to feel guilty.
More from the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations conference: Phil Gomes of Edelman on corporate blogging and relating to bloggers:
- Join online communities instead of trying to create them
- Your company really has more social media content than they think (Example: recording stories from the Butterball turkey hotline call center and turning them into podcasts)
- Finding your online voice isn’t rocket science, but it is more like brain surgery
- Don’t sweat the technology (it’s cheap/free)
… and on blogger relations:
- Make your friends before you need them
- Don’t be afraid to provide rough content
- Treat your biggest fans better than the so-called top-tier media
… and on blogola:
- The question is, what does the world expect of bloggers and what is PR’s responsibility within that? These are the issues that are being shaken out [as people discuss the propriety of blogola].
Great give and take on blogola between MWW CEO Michael Kempner and Strumpette:
Blog Relationship-Building: My Point of View (Kempner)
MWW CEO Kempner Puts Nikon Blog Program in the Spin Cycle
Another version of the blogola story: the MWW agency sent out $1000 Nikon cameras for bloggers to “try” for 6-12 months, after which they technically have to return them. Needless to say, this is another attempt to score positive publicity by showering blogger/journalists with goodies that the traditional media won’t accept.
Some links:
An Indiana-based blogger jumping right in with no regrets
Nice post over at Deep Jive Interests on blogola. Check it out — this subject is not going away.
In fact, it’s just starting. The only reason why blogola is even happening is that blogs have gained enough clout to make it worthwhile to try to influence them. But blogola does flag a key difference between the MSM and new media, which is the utter lack of widely accepted journalistic standards in the blogosphere. In my opinion, such standards will emerge as they did 100+ years ago as today’s MSM came into being, but it will be awhile and will come from people talking about things like how to deal with blogola. I do think that “credibility” is a marketable commodity and so just as there may be bloggers happy to take blogola, there will be others who will shun it so they can tout their independence as a selling point.
The Wall Street Journal had a fascinating story (sub. req.) last week about the publicists for the show “The New Adventures of Old Christine” ignoring mainstream TV critics and wooing bloggers to create buzz around the show.
The term “blogola” plays off the term “payola,” which was the word used when record company executives paid DJs to play certain songs on the radio. It was a huge scandal in the 1950s.
In this case, the so-called “mommy bloggers” were from a group of 12 blogs about motherhood. The star-struck bloggers got backstage access to the show and lots of freebies, and predictably, wrote glowing pieces about the show on their blogs. (The story didn’t, however, say whether the ‘glow’ translated into increased viewership of the show).
On the other hand, the publicist for the show was quoted by the Journal saying of mainstream TV critics that they “weren’t worth my time.”
I would chalk that comment up to PR spin. In all likelihood, these PR pros (rightly) concluded that the amateur bloggers would be more generous with their praise than would a seasoned TV critic, so they simply avoided the critics.