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.

ROP pages are down, everybody knows it. At my company, it feels like we’re finally satisfied that this isn’t just a “market fluctuation” and new types of ad programs are being formulated. Great! Maybe.

I thought these packages would focus on the Web and Internet projects — cool ways to get more information and more types of information to more people. It’s not going that way, though. We’re entering the golden age of the advertorial. Barf. The days of separation of church and state are gone.

So, dear reader, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much does your company follow the ASBPE Code of Ethics or similar? There has to be a way for my magazine to make money and for me to keep my ethics.