Every writer and editor knows the pitfalls of complaining about typos and minor grammatical mistakes in someone else’s. Murphy’s Law of Nitpicking says when you do that, you will invariably include a typo or a factual error in your own piece.
The stakes go twice as high when you start making lofty pronouncements about journalism and ethics. Today’s object lesson is BetaNews, which ran a story by Ed Oswald headlined “Blogger Ethics Questioned Over Microsoft Ad.”
Rule #1: If you’re a blogger writing about “whether bloggers should be considered journalists,” it helps to get the journalistic fundamentals right. Like spelling the name of Federated Media founder John Battelle properly. Misspelling it once is a typo. Getting it wrong three times (Batelle, with one T) is just sloppy.
Rule #2: If you’re going to throw penalty flags over mixing ads and editorial, you really should try not to have a Microsoft pop-up ad embedded in the text of the story! Here, see for yourself.
That’s a screen shot of the BetaNews story as it looked when I read it in my browser this afternoon. That double-underline under the word Microsoft in the second graf is a link to a paid ad from Vibrant Media. Here’s a close-up look at the pop-up ad that appeared when I moved the mouse pointer over the tagged word:
You want to talk about mixing advertising with content? This, in my opinion, is much worse than anything the Federated Media gang is accused of doing. This technique literally embeds advertiser messages in the words written by the post’s author. The effect is to encourage a site owner to write more about topics that result in more expensive paid ads and higher clicks. I don’t blame Microsoft for buying these ads, but I do blame the site owners who succumb to the lure of seemingly easy money and buy into this shady concept.
I hate these Vibrant ads (and the similar product from AdBrite) with a passion. I won’t allow them on this site and I go out of my way to avoid visiting sites that use them, including BetaNews. And yes, I realize that the double underlines make them look different from standard user-created links, but never underestimate the naivete of readers. And I’m sick of seeing these stupid ads pop up as I move my mouse over the page.
Ads don’t belong in content. Period.
PS: PC World Editor in Chief Harry McCracken, who has recent firsthand experience with the wall between ads and editorial (thankfully, it ended well for him), says “Journalists shouldn’t write ad copy.” Exactly right.
Ed Bott 