commbasics

The answer these four sites have determined is not business as usual. They have to do something about the lack of integrity and conscience in their work. People are less entertained by the salacious and are hungering for believable information. We are interrupting our series about Linkedin to day to take a look at a new trend in journalism that’s arisen in the past few weeks: A concern about journalistic integrity. Yeah, yeah, I know. Everyone talks about that in the field, but where it’s come up as a trend is what is fascinating. In the past month, four popular click-bait sites that claim some sort of journalistic value have pulled back a bit and said, “maybe we are going too far with this content thing.” First,  Upworthy  made an announcement that they are moving away from curating content and focusing on original material. This is more of a business decision than an editorial one. Upworthy became the fastest growing media company on the internet by merely grabbing ...

The first tenet of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics is "Seek truth and report it." Speculation is not truth. I got into an interesting discussion on journalistic integrity regarding the reporting on Google founder Sergey Brin 's impending divorce and I thought I'd layout my position here for an open discussion.  The story was initially reported by Liz Gannes of www.AllthingsD.com, got picked up by Techmeme and found its way to my eyes through a report by Rob Hof at Forbes that was in my Facebook feed.  I commented that it was not something I consider newsworthy and even Rob seemed apologetic about doing the piece.  (Note: I have known Rob professionally for many years and consider him a preeminent business and tech journalist).   Sergy Brin My comment was followed by several folks who defended the story as being newsworthy.  So I felt I had to actually read the story I didn't want to read and found this in Rob's ...

An article today in Forbes on ethics in sponsored content  brought back memories of our recent discussions regarding UBM Tech's methodology changes and the larger discussion about whether corporations can be expected to deliver ethical content. The article points out that Edelman has posted their own set of ethics regarding sponsored content that remarkably mirrors Footwasher Media's position:  That it isn't PR or advertising.  It's something different from what most corporate advocates practice and it must be, by nature, ethical or it loses all value. Many people in the news business have taken ethical standards for granted.  They seem to believe that they are intertwined with the genesis of journalism itself.  It isn't true.  The news business, supported by advertising began in the 1700s with Benjamin Franklin's founding of the Pennsylvania Gazette , but the separation of advertising from editorial did not appear until th...

This post is likely to piss off  a lot of people, but here goes.  The discussion regarding credibility and ethics related to sponsored-content as been civil and illuminating, and has generally reaffirmed my belief that there are now many forms of valid B2B communication, even if one believes one is morally superior to all others.  The one uncomfortable part of the discussion has been the veiled accusations of moral failure for certain individuals and organizations.  So last night I did a quick content snapshot of several publications. On one side I looked at sponsored-content sites, including New Tech Press in that category.  On the other side I looked at three sites that identify themselves as independent journalism . This is what I found.  On the independent sites, there were 40 to 50 pieces of content.  On one site, eight pieces were original and the other 42 were press releases , articles paid for by sponsors, and ads.  On the second s...

Last week we started a lively discussion about how media is evolving, what is right about it and what is wrong about it.  We also touched on the issue of reliability and ethics. Today an article from emediavitals.com crossed my screen and deals with the issue of ethics and content head on.  You may not agree with it, but it's a statement of what reality is for media today. Let me say this about the issue of ethics: there is no organizational structure that can absolutely ensure content follows a particular ethical standard .  In fact, the reliance on traditional business models in media, rather than actually knowing what the professional standard is has helped hasten the demise of traditional journalism in the 21st Century.  Ethics is a personal construct. You either are or are not ethical.  No one knows for sure where you stand or what you are doing.  Only you do.  Everyone else is just assuming where you stand.  Your organizational ...

OK, I’m a little behind it wrapping up this discussion.  Things are really getting crazy around here.  A couple of weeks ago I started talking about how SEO is not your biggest concern with your website and then followed up with how social networks followed that up with creating target audiences.  My premise is that both of the automated egalitarian technologies are being gamed by companies and building a basic distrust within their audiences.  I wrapped up my last post with: “So we are entering into another cycle; one that will be difficult for the current players to understand.  It is a cycle that will be based on ethics and trust and it is something that cannot be generated by an algorithm.” We’re going to build on that today. Trust is at the core of all genuine communication.  Once that goes out the window so does the communication.  That’s why search worked for a while because it wasn’t in the hands of the marketing department... until th...

Last Friday I dropped a flash-bang into the room saying search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t what you should be concerned about.  I got one comment from a SEO person pointing out, very nicely, that I didn’t know what I was talking about because SEO is still very important.  I don’t disagree with that statement because SEO is important... especially if you’re selling ink cartridges and boner pills.  That still doesn’t take away from my original statement.  SEO is not what you should be concerned about, especially if your business is about anything other than commodities. When Google got going in the mid double-oughts, search was THE thing.  People were still getting used to this interwebs thing and it was kinda fascinating being able to find all kinds of stuff that normally took a dozen phone books and a lot of shoe leather.  It also turned the garden hose of information in our lives into a viaduct.  People started applying subjective filters ...

Thought I would end the year with my position on the Wikileak issue.  I think it stinks and find myself in the weird position of supporting the governments' opinions. I've written rather extensively on the subject of journalistic ethics and Julian Assange violates everything I know to be journalistically ethical.  He is lower in my view that the National Enquirer and the paparazzi crowd.  Wikileaks is not even a decent whistle blowing entity. It is a self-important, self-righteous entity. There was no thought, research or consideration to the consequences in the action.  What Aftenposten in Norway is doing with the Wikileak documents is journalism. They have their reporters going over the information to find what should be covered; what actually affects the reading public. That's what real journalists do. I remember when I was a copy clerk in a daily paper and a reporter was looking for corruption in city government. He attained copies of city council...

Chris Edward did a post yesterday from over the "pond" on the blurring of the lines between PR and journalism, as personified by PR giant Edelman.  Some journalists are concerned about the lack of a filter in a medium controlled by corporate flacks, but Edwards correctly states that most of that concern is unwarranted. "The trend in recent years, despite all the talk about engagement and two-way communication, has been to sell, sell, sell. Don't go off-message, no matter how dull that message might be. Because no-one is going to get fired for sticking to the pre-approved script. At least not until companies start to see their profiles become less and less prominent. Then they might have a go at proper communication." Proper communication is not just controlling the medium.  It's all about conversation.  And if you try to control the conversation, it becomes a monologue, not communication. The key here, as I have said before , is ethics and a dedication to t...

Something happened this week that brought up the issue of transparency, journalistic independence and why both are needed for a vibrant media that properly serves the industry.  As many of you know, I was asked to start a blog on EDA Cafe back in June and started a series of podcasts focusing on the bottom line of design automation.  in other words, finding out the industry could justify its existence financially to its customers.   We started out with a couple of interviews with the CEOs of Magma and Tanner EDA and then of the Real Intent CEO.  The first two readily admitted that figuring out the real ROI of EDA tools is something that has not been done well and needs to be done better.  The third interview had the same revelation, but you might notice that the interview is no longer available on EDA Cafe.  Real Intent lodged a complaint to EDA Cafe regarding the statement in the interview from the CEO that they could not accurately estimate the ...

When I got the journalism bug back in 1971 I actually believed that our tradition of media objectivity dated all the way back to the Bill of Rights.  But over the years I've done a lot of study on the subject of the press, especially in the past 10 years, and discovered that the US press from about 1750 to 1950 was anything but objective.  In fact from the end of the the Revolutionary War through World War 1, the tenor of the American press had a greater resemblance to Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olberman than Woodward and Bernstein. The early American press was primarily anonymous.  Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin wrote scurrilous pieces about public friends and office holders that would be considered actionable today.  And they did it all under pen names. Jefferson blasted his "best friend" John Adams simply as "Anonymous" and Hamilton under the name "Brutus."  Hamilton took on both Adams, Jeffeson ...

It's amazing how some things just start coming together.  A couple of days ago Brian Fuller posited a position that the reading public just doesn't seem to care if what they are reading, watching or listening to is objective.  That same day I had a conversation with a young man who doesn't believe anything in the media is objective... period.  Yesterday, however, I met with two companies who now see the lack of objectivity as a real problem because their self-serving contributed articles are no longer making any impact on their marketing and sales efforts ... which means their entire marketing and sales effort is pretty much useless because they don't do advertising, they have no press to talk to and their news releases suck because they have no one who can write to help them. So, my Austin partner, Joe Basques and I sat down yesterday to have a conversation about it.  We're also opening the discussion on the Marketing like it's 199 9 Facebook Group.  Let's ...

Was watching a video on Jeremiah Owyang's site, and it ended with a statement that we "need to rethink copyright, authorship, identity...ethics..."  That's pretty much what I've been doing for several years now and have only, in the past 12 months, started to put into practice. The assumptions are always there.  "That's not journalism." "That's not ethical." "You don't ask the tough questions."  So I've started at the end and begun asking the tough questions.  What is journalism?  What is Ethics?  What is a tough question? Not getting a lot of real answers.  What I'm starting to find out is, in the midst of this very real sea change in how information is disseminated, parsed, consumed and created, we have assumptions, not answers.  Journalists have relied on the advertising departments of publications to insulate them from the decision processes that make up their eth...