Thursday, August 02, 2007
TechCrunch Crosses the Line With Sponsor Pitch
blog entry yesterday that was a list of its sponsors (aka advertisers)with brief descriptions.
This is an unusual move (ploy?) for a blog that is known for hard hitting commentary, and I'm not comfortable with tactic of referring to advertisers within the confines of the blog. The New York Times website or any other old media would never run an article of this nature, and while web rules are generally looser on separating church and state, this is a bad precedent.
While you could laud TechCrunch for its straightforwardness in throwing its sponsors a bone, editorial guidelines dictate leaving sponsors out of the content. Publishers are allowed/expected to write about their advertisers when appropriate, but a plug meant to get the advertisers names into the RSS feed is over the line. Ads can run alongside RSS feeds, so there is no need for this.
Bloggers (myself included) play under a different set of rules as we often don't have sales departments, and editors also function as publishers, negotiating deals with the advertisers that we cover. If a sponsor is a strategic partner in a publication, then cover them as a appropriate with full disclosure, but don't write about them without their being any value for the reader.
By John Gartner at 09:56 AM | Comments (0)
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