July 4th, 2009 No more pay-for-post blogs?
Wow — this is a sign of a new day. From Poynter: FTC to Investigate Bloggers Receiving Pay for Posts.
I’ve always felt that it’s caveat emptor with blogs, but I can see the point. I like a nice separation of church and state, although the Internet has bent if not broken a lot of those rules.
If you set yourself up to look like a news source and you’re really just a PR service, the reader should be told what’s really going on. But are we not giving the reader enough credit? Can the average reader tell the difference between a paid blog and a legit one?
Poynter asks if this may amount to “rattling the saber at blogs and social media” by the FTC, but it’s definitely exciting to see web reporting legitimized by the investigation. The FTC is basically saying there’s good blogging going on out there, and it should be differentiated from unethical reporting.