Chinese bloggers run the gauntlet of forced registration, censorship

June 21, 2005 by

Good news and bad news come intertwined in China, especially in its online world protected by the Great Firewall and the Golden Shield — technological attempts to control what’s said and viewed on the Internet.

The recent bad news that the Chinese government is requiring all bloggers to register with the government by June 30 or face shutdown was tempered by the fact that there’s always another free blog host somewhere in the world that’s less controlled. And when word leaked out that the new Microsoft joint venture in China running MSN Spaces was censoring words such as “freedom” and “democracy” from blog titles, it didn’t take long before Peacefire and the Committee to Protect Bloggers had a simple work-around to use those words.

The forces to fight censorship and government control around the globe are finding an increasingly more vocal and effective counter-effort to circumvent filtering and blocking.

In modern China, Internet access is exploding each year, with an estimated 130 million people coming online by the end of 2005 and about half having broadband. The bad news is that their view of the Internet is edited by tens of thousands of government censors who watch and block sites every day on subjects as varied as Taiwan, the Dalai Lama and human rights.

A recent report on China’s filtering efforts by the OpenNet Initiative called the government’s scheme the most sophisticated one in the world. “While there can be legitimate debates about whether democratization and liberalization are taking place in China’s economy and government, there is no doubt that neither is taking place in China’s Internet environment today,” the report concludes darkly.

But another bit of good news is that the popularity of online forums has been augmented with the rise of Weblogs, now numbering anywhere from 700,000 to the low millions. And alternate sources of news delivery such as SMS mobile messaging have helped spread government-suppressed news about the initial SARS outbreak and aided anti-Japanese protests last April.

As China becomes a technological powerhouse, Western high-tech companies are drooling at the prospects. The problem? How can these companies avoid becoming part of the censorship and filtering regime? Amnesty International had a scathing report last January which singled out Microsoft, Nortel, Cisco and Sun Microsystems for helping the Chinese government monitor Net users — and increasingly incarcerate them. Reporters Without Borders estimates that there are more cyber-dissidents in jail in China — 62 — than in any other country.

The technology companies largely defend their actions as saying they are only providing the tools and that people and governments use them how they wish. While this defense has served the tech companies well in a long history of working with China, the global rise of blogs has provided a counter-mechanism for worldwide protests that are outside any government’s control. The recent censorship by MSN Spaces, for instance, caused a brush fire in the blogosphere, and Microsoft blog evangelist Robert Scoble only fanned the flames with a post defending his employer.

“When doing business in various countries and, even, various states here in the U.S., we must comply with the local laws if we want to do business there,” Scoble wrote on his blog. “And, as a shareholder in Microsoft, I think it would be a bad decision to decide not to do business in China.”

Scoble argued that the Chinese people should make their own laws, and the people he met in China had an “anti-free speech stance.” But Rebecca MacKinnon, who runs the Global Voices blog project for Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, called Scoble’s view “the biggest pile of horseshit about China I’ve come across in quite some time.” The pile-on ensued and Scoble was told he was wrong by everyone from Dan Gillmor to his son and even co-workers — until he finally apologized and admitted he was wrong.

But don’t look for any of the companies doing business in China to make any apologies or pull back. Instead, they’ve put up a wall of silence of their own with the media. First the Microsoft joint venture said it was just following local laws and regulations in China, though there are no laws banning the use of the words “democracy” and “freedom.” Then MSN global sales and marketing director Adam Sohn told the AP that, “Even with the filters, we’re helping millions of people communicate, share stories, share photographs and build relationships. For us, that is the key point here.”

I tried to get a comment from Sohn or anyone at Microsoft to no avail. I also contacted Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and Yahoo PR but never got a response. A Google spokesperson passed me to another less responsive spokesperson on the subject.

My hope was to have a virtual roundtable with Chinese experts, bloggers, human rights officials and company representatives from Google, Yahoo and MSN. While these companies refused to comment in the roundtable, I did CC them all with every message in the e-mail discussion, so at least the conversation is in their in-box (and hopefully not in their spam folder). I also made multiple attempts to reach Chinese government officials, with no response. If any of these people decide to join the conversation, they are welcome to add their comments to the forum that runs below this column.

The following is an edited version of the roundtable that did take place over the past five days.

Andrea Leung is a Chinese-Canadian blogger raised in Hong Kong and currently living in Canada. She does project management and helps Chinese blogger Isaac Mao with projects at his Social Brain Foundation, a non-profit looking to bring collaboration and resource-sharing culture into China. Social Brain is organizing the first China Blogger Conference planned for Shanghai this autumn.

Julien Pain is the Internet desk officer at Reporters Without Borders, a French non-profit that works on behalf of journalists and bloggers around the world pursuing freedom of speech. Pain helped run the recent Freedom Blog Awards, which recognized 60 blogs around the world for helping defend freedom of expression.

Xiao Qiang is the director of the University of California-Berkeley’s China Internet Project. A physicist by training, Xiao became a full-time human rights activist after the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Xiao was the executive director of Human Rights in China (1991-2002) and is currently vice-chair of the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy.

Anne Stevenson-Yang is the managing director of the United States Information Technology Office (USITO) in Beijing. Before that, she was the founder and president of Clarity Data Systems, a software company making management and data-analysis systems for Chinese direct marketers. Prior to forming Clarity, she was vice president of business development for Metromedia China Corporation. She also spent four years as China director of the U.S.-China Business Council, a business association of U.S. corporations that invest in China.

Online Journalism Review: China has set out a deadline for blogs and Web sites to register with the government. How do you feel about this policy? What do you think the consequences will be for those who do or don’t register?

Anne Stevenson-Yang: I’ve been surprised that the tightening did not come sooner, a testament to the lack of blog-savviness of the Chinese leadership. Of course registration is even more politically concerning than remote surveillance tools like key-word search, and it automatically classifies all unregistered blogs as illegal and actionable, while of course authorities will not take registration applications for blogs unaffiliated with someone who holds an IIS [Internet Information Services] or ICP [Internet Content Providers] license. The affiliated sites are hardly blogs anyway — they are conventional publishing operations but written in a colloquial style. Probably the next step will be to require any approved bloggers to register as journalists.

Andrea Leung: First of all, in case it is still not clear yet, the bloggers who are most affected by the policy are those who have their blogs hosted on independent virtual servers. Those who publish a blog with a Chinese blog service provider similar to Blogger’s Blogspot or Typepad are not required to register at this time.

In China, the majority of the Chinese bloggers use a pseudonym in their blogs. The new registration requirement would, in theory, leave bloggers with no options to publish anonymously. Blogs would have to display a registration number and include a URL link back to the Ministry of Information’s Web site. This would allow the authorities to easily trace the real identity as well as location of a Web site owner.

For this reason, many bloggers were angry when they first heard about the law, let alone the requirements that the registration is not a one-time process but an annual exercise; and failure to comply may result in a hefty financial penalty.

So far, many are not clear on the exact requirements of the law. This ranges from who is required to register, where to register and what is required for registration, etc. The question of who (what type of Web site) is required to register is especially confusing given the law is vague. It has spurred a lot of discussions on the Internet with both information and misinformation, making it more confusing for anyone.

Some people have obviously registered — as they blogged about their experiences of registering on their blogs. But many haven’t. There is no complete set of statistics on either case. Some people haven’t decided whether they would register at all. Some are planning to leave it to the very last minute. Some adopt a wait-and-see approach as they ponder whether the law would be well enforced.

There are also a few cases indicated that their registrations were rejected. It is too early to tell the consequences for those who fail to register.

For sure, in some provinces, those who haven’t registered have already been “locked out” from their Web sites. All they could see is a system message saying that they must register or else their site will be shut down.

There are also doubts in the blogger community about the feasibility of the law, given a.) the sheer volume registrations that the government needs to process; and b.) the government’s poor track record in enforcing its policies. After all, the legal requirements that a Web site owner needs government approval prior to publishing a Web site is not new. It has never been well enforced in the past.

Regardless of whether the registration will really be able to patrol bloggers after the June 30 registration deadline, the chilling effect has been felt. Chinese bloggers, in general, are convinced that the government can find out who they are and will watch what they write after they register their Web sites.

OJR: In Iran, the bloggers are more trusted than the state-run news sources. For a long time, Iranian bloggers were under the government’s radar but now are finding life difficult with arrests. How much does the broader Chinese society know about Chinese blogs, and what role do the bloggers play? Do they do journalism-type reporting, commentary or a mix? Due to the chilling effect of the registration rules, do you believe they might turn to an anonymous blogging service run from a Western country, if it was relatively safe from detection?

Xiao Qiang: When we talk about the role of spreading information and expressing public opinions, it is important to not just mention blogs and bloggers, but also to include BBS (online discussion forums). While blogging has been rapidly growing in China in last two years, its public influence has not matched BBS.

Since 1997, the most popular Internet portals allow users to discuss current events by posting comments on bulletin boards or real-time chat rooms linked to specific news stories. Such discussions have become popular both in the private portals and on official Web sites such as the People’s Daily‘s popular Strong Nation Forum, which has more than 200,000 registered members. At any normal hour, more than 10,000 users are online to participate in these discussions. The number of registered users for the top 10 bulletin boards, which focus on news and political affairs, range from 100,000 to 500,000, while the number of online users at any normal hour can reach 15,000. Today, there are hundreds of online forums on different subjects across Chinese cyberspace.

The blogosphere is now also increasingly important to spread information and give bloggers a personal platform to express themselves. Many bloggers are also active participants in the BBS and more and more BBS users migrate themselves to the blogosphere. Both online forums and the blogosphere are closely monitored by China’s Internet police, and their hosts meticulously control and censor comments to ensure that the discussion does not cross politically acceptable boundaries. However, because of the sheer number of blogs and the anonymity of online forums, together they still create a widespread, efficient, and direct communication space that does not exist anywhere else in Chinese society.

In online forums, there are lots of journalism-type reporting; here is one example covering the Shalan flash flood.

While in the online forums one can publish information without their real name, the blogosphere is much more distributed and interlinked for spreading information and is giving censors a big headache [when trying] to clean the space.

Stevenson-Yang: I agree that the BBS phenomenon is more socially important and, in a sense, subversive, than blogging because BBS forums have permitted just about anyone to enter public debate, while blogs are less ephemeral and so more of a risk to the individuals posting. The various supervisory groups — retiree committees associated with the Propaganda Bureau that review media for non-conforming content, departments of the local police looking out for online fraud and pornography, the different ministry personnel charged with watching online violations of their own areas (like illicit information from broadcasters overseen by SARFT, gaming content overseen by Culture, etc.) are more likely to notice established blogs than BBS, just because of the age and online habits of the people conducting the monitoring exercises.

And clearly, blogs have been and will increasingly be targeted for higher-level administration, while BBS will more or less be left to each site’s administrators, already held responsible for blocking offensive content and for caching the traffic for three months in case police want to chase down someone who’s been posting. I imagine that the real significance of the BBS will be to foster the emergence of a few, influential commentators, people like Fang Xingdong, just as the newspapers, as they’ve commercialized, have engendered star columnists who become difficult for the authorities to dislodge and who eventually influence public debate.

Leung: I concur with Xiao that the public influence of blogs is rather limited up until now considering that there are only about 700,000 blogs in China as of April 2005, according to CNblog.org’s estimate. This is less than one percent of the total Internet population in China, which is now estimated at around 100 million. Nonetheless, it was growing at a very fast rate over the past two years.

Only a very small percentage of Chinese blogs focus exclusively on politics and current affairs. (For more details on this, see this paper.) But their potential as an alternative information channel should not be underestimated. While most blogs are personal in nature and focus mostly on any topics other than politics, at times when a local injustice occurred, bloggers would halt writing on their regular topics and be the first ones to break news, often in the form of eyewitness or first-hand experience accounts, while mass media remained quiet. The Niu Niu scandal; news of restricted public access to Tsignhua University’s BBS; anti-Japanese street demonstrations are some examples, just to name a few.

Given the blogging network is highly distributed, interconnected and instantaneous by nature, blogs enjoy a narrow window of opportunity to rapidly relay controversial news across the country through desktops as well as Web-based blog aggregators — and through linking, re-posting or commenting on a blog post.

They also foment public discussions online across multiple blog clusters and offline in a blogger’s personal network of friends and family until the topic comes to the authorities’ attention — at which point, the authorities either yield to public pressure and address a public concern (as in the Niu Niu incident), or order the silencing of a topic. An example of the latter was on April 17, when the state ordered all Internet content providers, including Chinese blog service providers, to refrain from publishing anti-Japanese content and the Internet was instantly sanitized overnight on topics related to anti-Japanese. Some bloggers would delete politically unacceptable content to avoid troubles such as threats of having their blogs close down or other forms of retributions.

Of course, this picture may all be changed if bloggers felt that their content was heavily scrutinized and relaying sensitive information may have serious consequences.

During and after the recent anti-Japanese protests, some bloggers have set up an alternative blog on international sites such as Yahoo 360 and MSN Spaces. They perceived international sites as safer places where there are no content policing and they could blog anonymously. These are the only solutions that they are aware of and are accessible to them from a usability standpoint (i.e. doesn’t require any advanced technical skills to set up and operate).

They would use international sites whenever they want to express opinions that may deem politically sensitive. But they would also continue blogging on their existing sites that are in China for a variety of reasons (e.g. they’re happy with their existing blog software and didn’t want to switch to another platform; emotional attachment to blog’s URL address; fear that their sites would be blocked or would take a long time to connect to if hosted outside of China).

OJR: How should an Internet company such as MSN, Yahoo or Google do business with China in an ethical way? Knowing that the government wants certain words censored and might well ask for identities of people who use their services for reasons of prosecution, how does a U.S. or other Western company enter into these arrangements without becoming a collaborator on chilling free speech? How can the companies NOT do business with China and rationalize that to shareholders?

Stevenson-Yang: I can’t comment on Microsoft, but we should remember that all commercial sites operating in China deploy such tools, whether or not automated (some just have people watching the traffic), and posting error messages saying that you can’t use certain words is more transparent than the practices of most sites.

Julien Pain: That’s not an easy question to answer. But it is an issue that any information technology company should tackle before doing business in China. I believe that private companies should take into account the consequences of their activities in terms of freedom of expression. If they don’t want their activity to be regulated by the American government, which is fair enough, they have to respect some basic ethical standard.

I understand that the competition between these companies is very harsh, and that they fear they could lose markets. But they should always respect the universal values defined by the U.N. declaration on human rights, including its Article 19 on free speech. I’m not saying that they should fight for freedom of expression. But they should at least refuse to collaborate on the Chinese censorship system. And that’s what they are doing in China.

When you censor yourself, your search engine or blog tool, you collaborate on the Chinese censorship. I mean it: You don’t only comply with its laws, you collaborate. And there’s no excuse for that. I know that the question was more precise. But I can’t give these companies complete answers about what their policy should be. The only thing I would preach here is: dialogue. I believe that it is through dialogue that these companies will find acceptable solutions.

First, dialogue among competitors. Instead of competing without rules, maybe they could find agreements on the principles none of them should ever break. Is that so difficult for Microsoft, Google and Yahoo to meet once and decide that none of them should collaborate with the Chinese censors? They’ll probably answer that this would give the market to Chinese firms. I don’t think so, because the Chinese IT companies are not yet as efficient as the American ones. In other words, they still need you.

And make no mistake. They may let you enter their market. But in the long run, they’ll do their best to favor their own companies and make you bankrupt if they can. Second, engage in a dialogue with us, the human rights organizations. We don’t demonize private companies. We’re willing to discuss and help them find acceptable compromises. But so far, none of these companies have ever accepted to talk to us.

Finally, I think if you stick to universal values, your customers will trust you. Otherwise, you will tarnish your image, in the Western world as well as in China. And in the end people will use other blog tools, other search engines. Is it really worth it? Is China that powerful that you have to comply with all of its demands? That’s your choice. But we’ll keep on alerting public opinion if you don’t respect the values we stand for.

Filed Under: Ethics Tagged With: , , , , ,

When Web print stories disappear, the meaning of 'archives' fades

June 6, 2005 by

“So let us drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of a history that will never be completed about a world we can never understand.” — Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, 1946-63

If Graham thought it was impossible to do a first draft of history in the newspaper, imagine how much more impossible he would consider our present time, when newspaper stories are examined, prodded and picked over on newspaper sites and in online archives.

Now, the struggle over writing and editing the first draft of history includes a little birdie on the shoulders of journalists telling them that their work might live on forever on the global Web — and not just in a musty morgue or library. While most editors and ethicists believe that every single story that appears in a newspaper should also appear on the paper’s Web site and archive, there have been exceptions to the rule.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer didn’t post a recent story on teen suicides on its Web site for two days, the Missoulian (Mont.) took a story about competitor New West off its Web site after a few days, and the San Francisco Chronicle spiked a 1999 story about the Columbine shootings due to complaints about a videogame angle. Plus, after a high-profile lawsuit from freelance writers, many online publications and databases had to pull their stories due to lack of compensation.

In the case of the Post-Intelligencer, reporter Claudia Rowe wrote a sensitive story about three teens who had recently committed suicide in succession over a number of weeks. When Rowe first approached suicide experts in her reporting, they were wary of the possibility that press sensationalism could in turn cause more teen suicides.

“Before the story was printed, we had experts who were nervous that we were even doing the story,” said Mark Matassa, city editor at the P-I. “Some of the feedback we were getting was that anytime you write about this, there’s a danger of provoking more suicides, which obviously wasn’t our intention. But it’s also not our intention to not do important journalism because somebody’s afraid that someone might take it wrong.”

Once the story ran on May 23, however, those same experts were relieved at Rowe’s sensitive handling of the material and were satisfied with wider Web distribution. However, the editors held off on posting the story online initially, with the twin concerns that teens were more likely to read it online and that the editors might lose control of where the story was posted and passed around online.

“The initial thinking was that because we were taking so much care with the presentation of the story in the newspaper, if we put it online, we don’t have the same control,” Matassa told me. “The story gets picked up and moves around the Internet really quickly. We were nervous about presenting the story in a way that allowed us to ensure that we were doing it properly.”

This passage, in particular, shows how technology itself played a part in the story: “Technology, it turns out, was central to the way their deaths unfolded,” Rowe wrote. “Each boy sent an electronic goodbye to his friends moments before pulling the trigger, and each has since become part of an ongoing cyber conversation among the network of teenagers left behind.”

But after two days of holding off on posting the story online, the editors had enough positive feedback to feel comfortable putting it on the Web — though they included an Editor’s Note explaining their thought process.

Editor’s Note: This story, published in print editions of the Post-Intelligencer on Monday, May 23, was not immediately posted online primarily because of the effect experts advised us it could have on suicidal teens. After seeing the story, suicide-prevention experts now believe it is responsible and constructive and deserves wider dissemination. For those reasons and after many requests from readers, we reconsidered and are posting Monday’s story.

While Matassa is not in charge of what goes online at the Post-Intelligencer’s site, he does have a deeper understanding of how the Web’s extension of a print story’s life affects the work done on the front end.

“Even more so, you better make darn sure your stories are right, that they’re smart, thoughtful stories, they quote people accurately, you get the facts right and aren’t making stuff up — all those things that you expect journalists to do,” he said. “Especially because they’re living online for eternity and beyond, that ought to doubly get your attention.”

Aiding and abetting the enemy in Montana?

Not all cases of spiked stories online involve sensitive social issues or court-ordered removals, however. In Missoula, Montana, the daily Missoulian newspaper rules supreme. When the upstart New West grassroots media Web site came to town, the reigning daily refused to sell classified job ads to the startup.

Then Missoulian business reporter Robert Struckman did an in-depth story on New West in March and interviewed its founder and editor in chief, Jonathan Weber. The story was approved by Missoulian publisher John VanStrydonck and appeared in print and on the newspaper’s Web site. However, a few days later, the story inexplicably disappeared from the site and searches for keywords brought up nothing.

Weber suspects the publisher was upset with positive coverage of a competing outlet and had it pulled online.

“It’s sort of like trying to pretend that it was never there, some kind of rewriting of history,” Weber told me. “It’s kind of peculiar and not an appropriate thing to do. We had a story about something a guy had written on his personal Weblog, and we did a story about this, and when the guy realized we were doing a story, he took his Web site down. But we found the site in the Google cache so he wasn’t actually able to expunge his Web site. So you can’t really fully expunge something from the Internet.”

In fact, the story is far from expunged from the Net. Weber had e-mailed a copy of the Missoulian article to a friend and had that copy to post on New West. He then used the whole embarrassing episode as the basis of a second-person screed about VanStrydonck’s thinking.

“It’s harder to control the pesky journalists in your own newsroom,” Weber wrote. “They actually go out and do a story about one of those new competing publications, granting it far more publicity and business advantage than it ever could have gotten from the advertisement that you so shamelessly refused to run. But God forbid you try to tell them what they can and can’t run. It’s not like the old days, when the Missoulian was a wholly-owned mouthpiece of Montana’s copper magnates. Now you have to appear editorially upright. Reporters and editors can piss and moan and run stories that undermine your business strategy. At least you can order the offending story expunged from the archives!”

Despite repeated phone calls and e-mails, VanStrydonck and Struckman refused to comment for my story, leaving Weber’s screed and posting of the Missoulian story as the last word on it. However, there’s one interesting aspect of the Case of the Disappearing Business Profile: The Missoulian Web site itself is far from comprehensive when it comes to posting print stories online. Due to cutbacks or lack of interest, the site is not a complete archive of print material, undercutting the newspaper’s own online authority on its reporting.

When complaints spiked a story

There was a time not that long ago when newspaper Web sites were almost completely off the radar for newspaper executives. At the old San Francisco Chronicle — pre-Hearst buyout — the SFGate online arm was run completely separately with almost no input from print editors.

It was in those days, in April 1999, that the newspaper ran a story about the Columbine High (Colorado) shooters that combined wire services with a staff byline, Jaxon Vanderbeken. Vanderbeken’s reporting included quotes from a police expert on Goths, Sergeant Dave Williams from the Dayton, Ohio, police department. One particular passage relating to Williams raised the hackles of videogamers:

“Sergeant Williams says some Goths act out a bizarre and elaborate role-playing game, ‘Vampire: The Masquerade.’ He said one particularly dark aspect of the Gothic is when role playing is carried to extreme. ‘The game — Vampire: The Masquerade — I call it Dungeons and Dragons on steroids,’ he said, adding that players assume the persona of vampires and act out attacks. ‘There are people who I have seen who lose touch, who think the gaming system and mythos are real. They have gone off and done some very strange things. Basing things on my experience, is there a propensity for this? It’s possible.'”

The publisher of the “Vampire” game, White Wolf, lashed out at the Chronicle’s coverage with a press release. The Chronicle itself ran a longer, more thoughtful story which included interviews with teens who consider themselves to be Goths and who play the game “Vampire” but don’t make the connection to violence.

But even after all those moves, the SFGate continued to get complaints about its first story on the subject. The paper finally pulled the story from its archives and left a note up on the original URL saying, “This story was removed by the San Francisco Chronicle. A subsequent story on the same subject can be found at the following URL [pointing to the later story].”

“[After White Wolf] linked to the story, we heard impassioned complaints from HUNDREDS of kids — even after we corrected the story and said there was no evidence that [the shooters] ever played those games,” said SFGate editor Vlae Kershner via e-mail. “After a few weeks, we got tired of taking the heat and took down the story. I should add that under our current corrections policy, if the same thing occurred again we’d correct the mistake online and annotate the article as corrected, but we would not delete it.”

Though the story isn’t in SFGate’s archives, you can find a full copy of it on an Italian gaming site. So even the best efforts of expunging the past run into trouble online, where so many people can cut and paste text elsewhere and the Wayback Machine can archive it all.

An eternal life for plagiarism

While these examples deal with controversial subjects either with the public at large or within the newspaper’s management, what about all those plagiarized and problematic stories penned by Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Jack Kelley at USA Today? You might be surprised to learn that all those stories remain intact in those newspapers’ archives as well as databases such as LexisNexis — but with large editor’s notes at the top of them. (Perhaps most bizarrely you have to pay to read an archived version of Blair’s fabricated stories at NYTimes.com.)

USA Today, the New York Times and Washington Post all adhere to a pretty simple guideline to online posting of print stories: If it ran in print, it’s part of the public record and must run online. USAToday.com vice president and editor in chief Kinsey Wilson said that even a made-up story by Kelley about vigilantes among Israeli settlers is still available online with a detailed correction at the top.

“In that case, as well as in other less egregious cases where stories are found to contain inadvertent factual errors, our practice is to append an editor’s note or a correction rather than purge the story from our online archive,” Kinsey said via e-mail. “I can’t rule out the possibility that we might remove a story from our servers under certain circumstances — a finding of libel, for example, or a simple production error that led to content being published in error. But as a rule we do not think the public or our readers are served by ‘disappearing’ stories that have been vetted, published and then later found to be problematic.”

Online research databases also strive to keep the public record complete. Judy Schultz, spokeswoman for LexisNexis, says that it’s a very rare occurrence when stories are pulled and mainly under court orders such as for the freelance writers who sued.

“I think [pulling stories] is something that would be negotiated,” Schultz told me. “One of our aims is to create an archive of publications. Once something’s in print, you can’t really take it back. I’m trying to leave you with the impression that we would not normally do that. The only time that I know we have removed anything from our service was when the freelance writers sued the New York Times and us and other sources…In the normal course of business, we would leave the original story in with the correction.”

The Post-Intelligencer’s Matassa doesn’t believe in that blanket rule, however, and thinks of the Web as more than just an online archive for static copy.

“I don’t think you need to leave the wrong version on there for a historical record,” Matassa said. “I think you want to have the right story living on. If you do a story that you determine is false or the source cannot be verified, the wise thing to do is take them off. I think of online as more than microfiche. It’s a publishing venue that continues publishing. That’s different than something you check out of a library to look up and see what ran on a given day.”

But ethicists believe that appended corrections are appropriate — in most cases. Stephen Ward, associate professor of journalism ethics at the School of Journalism at University of British Columbia, told me that online is indeed a different animal than microfiche but that archives should be just what they mean: the original record preserved. Ward thinks that a correction would even lessen a libel threat. He points to one example in Canada of how spiked online stories could hurt the public at large.

“In 2004, the National Post carried a small correction saying a medical reporter had been dismissed for a series of fabricated quotes and sources in a number of stories,” Ward said via e-mail. “The newspaper assured the readers that no false ‘medical’ information had been provided. But questions arose later as to whether, in fact, questionable medical information had been provided via the fabricated stories. When an ethics researcher tried to research these stories and these claims, he found that many of the stories had been removed entirely from the paper’s archives, making it more difficult to identify and obtain the original stories.”

Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute, agrees with the general principle of running all print stories online with corrections noted. But she does see some gray areas.

“A story that causes obvious harm to an individual should probably come down,” McBride said via e-mail. “For instance, if you wrote a story that accused me of child neglect, and then you discover that you got it wrong, it wouldn’t be enough to just put an editor’s note at the top of the story that said: This story is erroneous. Because the accusation would be very harmful to me. That said, it makes me nervous when stories just disappear. I think the most responsible way to handle that is allow a site search engine to search the copy as if it was there. But then when the user calls up the story, he gets an editor’s note which explains why the story is not there but does not repeat the harm that was caused by the original erroneous report.”

But Ward’s point still stands. If you were the subject of such a harmful story, would you want the story expunged with a vague note about what happened, or would you want the original copy there to clarify exactly what was written? These are the types of things that drive editors nuts, keep ethicists up at night and ultimately mean less and less on the Net where a page posted for a few hours can live on for eternity.

Filed Under: Ethics Tagged With: ,

The cost of ethics: Influence peddling in the blogosphere

February 17, 2005 by

It wasn’t long ago that bloggers and money had nothing to do with each other. But as the blogosphere exploded into the public consciousness over the past year – PubSub estimates there are more than 8 million Weblogs, or online journals – it was inevitable that the captains of commerce would latch onto this increasingly popular form of personal media.

Blogging is growing up. For better, for worse.

It has become common to see advertising on personal blogs. Major corporations such as Microsoft, Nokia and Dr Pepper have launched blogs. Executives like Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban now blog (see related OJR story). Ad-supported blogs such as PaidContent, Weblogs Inc. and Corante have formulated standards for separating commerce from editorial content.

The latest issue thrust before the tribunal of blog opinion: What are the rules when commercial entities offer payments or freebies to get bloggers to write about them?

Several events have sparked a debate about whether an ethical threshold has been crossed: the decision by Marqui, a company in Vancouver, to pay bloggers to mention the company; Newsweek’s revelation that a group of 100 technologists in Silicon Valley accepts free products and services in return for word-of-mouth endorsements (or not); and the news that BzzAgent, a 3-year-old Boston company, has enlisted thousands of volunteers to generate buzz for clients’ products, sometimes in ethically questionable ways.

The ground is shifting so rapidly that the Word of Mouth Marketing Association last week released a draft Code of Ethics to help define the rules of the road. (The group invites the public to participate in the process.)

Cyberspace and the blogosphere add new wrinkles to the debate. Just how far can marketers go in soliciting blog coverage of their products or services? Does the practice of paying bloggers to blog about a product amount to an advertorial, embedded infomercial or product placement – and does such an arrangement violate the compact of trust between reader and writer? Or is it simply the next logical step in the blogosphere’s evolution from hobby to business opportunity? Do different rules apply to journalists who blog?

Stowe Boyd, president of Corante’s Weblog network, has been particularly withering in his criticism of the Marqui program, calling the bloggers who agreed to participate “paid shills” and warning that such programs threaten to “turn the blogosphere into a graffiti-laden slum where you won’t be able to tell if a blog posting is genuine or a paid message.”

Marqui’s bloggers have been quick to respond, suggesting that publishers of group blogs were simply trying to prop up their existing ad models in the face of “a brave new experiment that shortens the line of communication between a producer of a product and a customer,” as Marqui blogger Alan Herrell puts it. Gawker, for instance, just nailed a $25,000 a month buy from Sony as the sole sponsor for its LifeHacker blog about the personal gadgetry software. (Nick Denton of Gawker Media, who originally floated the idea of a blog ethics committee to create standards in blog advertising, and his counterpart at Weblogs Inc., Jason Calacanis, who originally endorsed the idea, declined to be interviewed. Boyd said he’d be happy to revive the proposal for a codified set of standards.)

Most observers agree on one point: Bloggers and traditional journalists don’t play by the same rulebook. Consider the unsparing standards set out in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Code, which instructs journalists to:

  • Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
  • Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
  • Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
  • Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.
  • Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money …

Bloggers sometimes act as journalists, but they uniformly say they hew to different standards than professional journalists. “The idea that there has to be a Chinese wall is an industrial-era notion that doesn’t take into account the cottage media era we live in,” said Mitch Ratcliffe, a veteran tech journalist and blogger. “When I am blogging and I am both publisher and editor, I’m playing by different rules, and there is, across the blogosphere, an evolving set of mores that will never become hard and fast rules for all bloggers.”

While they may not have a rulebook, bloggers have evolved a loose-knit set of general tenets. These principles seem to be widely held:

  • Disclose, disclose, disclose. Transparency – of actions, motives and financial considerations – is the golden rule of the blogosphere.
  • Follow your passions. Blog about topics you care deeply about.
  • Be honest. Write what you believe.
  • Trust your readers to form their own judgments and conclusions.
  • Reputation is the principal currency of cyberspace. Maintain your independence and integrity – lost trust is difficult to regain.

Others have come up with their own formulations. Rebecca Blood, author of “The Weblog Handbook,” identified six principles of blog ethics. And Jonathan Dube of CyberJournalist.net issued a Bloggers Code of Ethics. But as Ratcliffe suggests, the blogger’s penchant for independence means that even these guidelines may be trumped by an even higher law: Don’t impose your rules on me.

“It is still early in the evolution of the Internet, and there is no one true way,” Herrell said.

“The blogosphere runs on customs and norms – on what the community feels is acceptable,” adds Steve Rubel, vice president of a New York public relations firm and proprietor of the popular Micropersuasion blog. “It’s so early that people are experimenting with different types of marketing models. Eventually, someone will cross the line and the community will police itself.”

The latest wrangle over blog ethics began in November when Marqui, which sells communication management services for automating Web sites, announced its experimental program. The company was seeking to increase awareness of its brand among influential members of the software developer community.

“Our original fear was that this would destroy the whole the concept of the free and open blogosphere,” said Stephen King, Marqui’s CEO and president. “But we decided it could be done if the right safeguards were put in place.”

Marqui enlisted 20 bloggers of various backgrounds and readerships, including tech journalist Mitch Ratcliffe, podcaster Eric Rice, tech entrepreneur Jon Lebkowsky, Rochester Institute of Technology professor Liz Lawley, programmers Lucas Gonze, Alan Herrell and Robin Good and others. (A full list of bloggers and their posts is available, and Marqui launched its own blog last month and also posted a FAQ.)

With Ratcliffe’s help, Marqui crafted a contract that set out the game rules and posted it online. Under the program, disclosure of the bloggers’ relationship with Marqui is encouraged. Bloggers are required to publish the Marqui icon and mention Marqui in a blog post at least once a week, but they’re free to speak their minds and write anything, positive or negative. They’re also free to blog directly about the company’s products or pursue a different angle. In return, they receive $800 a month. The initial round of three-month contracts expires next week.

“We wanted to make certain that this would not be an advertorial, the kind of unscrupulous arrangement where it’s unspoken who is paying for what,” King said. “We don’t tell bloggers what to write. We’re doing this to get a conversation started, and we want the right to participate in that debate.”

Each of the bloggers headed off in different directions. Ratcliffe declined to write about Marqui’s products, instead focusing his blog posts on the implications of the paying-bloggers program itself. Rice donated $1,000 of his proceeds to the podcasting community. Good decided not to accept a $50 commission for each product lead that his blog generated.

Wrote Good: “I have a radical vision where publishers will choose their sponsors rather the other way around. I know, it may appear crazy, but that is what I am seeing now. I also see a near-coming future where I will be able to personally select the companies/products/services I want to endorse because they fully represent my spirit both in terms of products value as well as in terms of company vision, strategy and attitude.”

As it happens, Good also delivered a public smack down of Marqui for the way it released a whitepaper without getting input from the community.

Marqui believes the program has been a monumental success. The company has gone from 2,000 mentions on Google in October to 155,000 mentions today. The blog program has morphed, King said, from being a vehicle for reaching developers into “the cornerstone of our branding.”

Marqui underestimated the impact its bloggers would have on the company.

“Nobody knew what would happen,” King said. “We’re now doing demand creation and market research in real time. We get immediate feedback on the plusses and minuses of our product. It has proved to be a transformative experience for us as a company because you have to stay constantly in touch with your bloggers and your customers and responding to what their needs are. I think that’s been good for us. Including bloggers in the mix changes not only your marketing approach but your entire corporate culture.”

But others suggest that disclosure – while important – may not always be sufficient.

Om Malik, a blogger, author and tech reporter for Business 2.0 magazine, laid into the Silicon Valley 100 last month when it was disclosed that 100 influential members of the Bay Area’s tech community are periodically offered products or services – or schwag, as Malik terms it – to tout or not tout as they please.

“We all trust each other in this business,” Malik said. “When an industry analyst promotes a company to boost his employer’s stock or a venture capitalist touts a company he’s invested in, we’ve learned the hard way to take that with a grain of salt. Now it’s going to be more difficult to know whether there’s a hidden agenda in what people are telling you.”

Auren Hoffman, the entrepreneur behind the Silicon Valley 100, acknowledges that his 100 movers and shakers – who include venture capitalists, business executives, party planners and a dozen or so bloggers – aren’t instructed to disclose their relationship with the group. But he said, “These are people who can’t be bought. If we were paying people, we wouldn’t be able to get influencers of this caliber and integrity.”

Hoffman serves as a facilitator, trying out new gadgets and services and sending them out to interested members of the group. “If they use a product and think it’s cool, we hope they’ll want to talk about it with the people they meet on a daily basis.” The members get to keep the products – such as a $900 temperature-controlled toilet seat — after the initial tryout.

The San Francisco Bay Area is good place for “tipping” gadgets, technology wine, or politics, Hoffman said, borrowing a term from Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.” Boston might be a good place for tipping beer, while other regions would be better for tipping food, movies, books, jeans or new vodkas. He hopes to expand his word-of-mouth program to other areas.

Ross Mayfield, CEO of wiki company Socialtext and a member of the elite 100, said, “Every blogger who is member of the SV100 has not only disclosed it but bent over backward to disclose every aspect of the relationship.”

Chris Shipley, an SV100 member who organizes NetworkWorld’s DEMO conferences, said, “You need to differentiate between paid shills, product placements and product reviews. Many companies are effectively using bloggers to review their products and these bloggers are doing fair and frank reviews. This is a practice not unlike product reviews in traditional media channels.

“Bloggers who take money or other graft and, as a result, write biased, uncritical flattery about people, products, ideas, companies, etc. will ultimately lose their credibility, and along with it their readership and influence,” she adds.

Malik remains unconvinced. “I am going to selectively monitor and remove the feeds of some of bloggers among the schwag set. You don’t accept corporate schwag – you write about a product and you ship it back.”

Others agree that the line between content and promotion is being fudged. Rob Greenlee of WebTalkRadio commented on Ratcliffe’s blog: “It is unnatural to think that Mitch would post negative criticisms about a sponsor. … I think we are mixing the concept of objective product review and advertising. This is the ethical dilemma.”

Ron Williams, CEO of alternative news publisher Dragonfly Media, said, “We’ve reached a saturation point with commercial message among people who resent the intrusion of commercialism into almost every aspect of their lives. We’ve starting to see blowback and resentment.”

Boyd points to Marqui’s rising visibility in the blogosphere as the proof of his indictment.

While blog advertising has become standard practice, Boyd said, “It starts to get cheesy when the blogger is not necessarily writing entries based on his passions, interests and insights. He’s being influenced to put things into his blog because he’s being paid to do it. That violates a basic operating principle of the blogosphere. This isn’t carved in stone or brought down from the mountaintop on tablets, but the fact that an advertiser is paying you to write about them means that you’re handing over your editorial decision-making and you’re selling that off. And I think that’s wrong.”

Boyd also criticizes the activities of BzzAgents – where volunteer marketers may phone bookstores to increase interest in a particular book, feigning ignorance about its title – as another form of “social spam.” In a similar vein, Armstrong Williams was discredited when it was disclosed that he was posing as an objective commentator promoting No Child Left Behind at the same time he was receiving a $240,000 annual income from the Bush administration. Later, two additional conservative columnists on government payrolls were outed.

“When you have a conversation with a friend or trusted associate, you shouldn’t have to wonder in the back of your mind, ‘Has he been paid to say that?’” Boyd said. “You’re automatically diluting and squandering your trust by putting your editorial content up for bid.”

Staci D. Kramer, executive editor of PaidContent, said, “It’s one thing to have a sponsor – we certainly like ours – but it’s quite another to write about sponsors or advertisers in exchange for money. That’s an advertorial, in print parlance, and if it’s not done right it can taint editorial.”

In response to such criticisms, Marqui’s King said, “If I come across a blog and see that part of it is sponsored, I agree that I would approach that content with a higher degree of skepticism. I’m not arguing with that, because that’s how I would react, too. But bear in mind that our bloggers disclose their relationship with us and they’re writing both positive and negative things about us and we are not editing anything.”

King said that in the next round of blogging for dollars, some of the current bloggers will be dropped and others added. “One of the things we’re learning is that for bloggers to write regularly about us, they need to be closer to our market,” he said. “We’d like them to look at the product. They can interview customers, they can interview people around the subject – it just has to remain interesting, and in that sense they’re acting as amateur journalists.”

Ratcliffe, who said he expects to have his contract renewed, may have a problem with that approach. “If they wanted to change the contract to say, you’ve got to write a story about our product, I would not be doing it anymore. I was trained as a journalist so I have a very strict sense of ethics. I don’t blog about Marqui or its products, I blog about the business questions raised by its blogger program.”

That’s in line with his Dec. 3 post: “I am just writing my blog with the same indifference to the advertiser as I had as a journalist. … If I rhapsodized about or went on at length dissecting the product, which would be rather disingenuous and boring, if you ask me, I’d have turned my blog into a service for Marqui rather than a publication for my readers.”

(Interestingly, Ratcliffe criticizes the Silicon Valley 100 operation as “creepy,” while SV100 founder Hoffman criticizes the Marqui program as “out there.”)

Other Marqui bloggers do not share Ratcliffe’s hesitation about blogging about a sponsor. Herrell tells me, “The Chinese wall meme is smoke and mirrors, as editors do have a foot on both sides of the wall up to their eyeballs, and despite protests to the contrary this does create a bias that affects the decision of what to publish.”

King believes that what Marqui is doing falls squarely within the boundaries of ethical behavior. “In the traditional media market, the advertorial is deliberately meant to mislead. It’s designed to look like it’s part of the newspaper or magazine. We’re not doing that. You know what you’re getting.

“We all know that influence happens at publications,” he added. “So we can’t sit here and say, ‘Look how pure the real journalists are.’ If you advertise in a trade publication, you’ll have an influence on whether your company might get mentioned, even if you have no influence on what or how it gets mentioned. The way newspapers handle that is church and state: The advertising people don’t influence the writers or editors. But if there’s just one person, you can’t have a wall because the blogger is taking our money as an ad person and he’s also serving as an amateur journalist by writing whatever he wants. But the same code of ethics applies.”

That’s true, to some extent. But credible publications always demarcate advertorial from editorial content. (Sony Style magazine would not fall under the umbrella of “credible.”) All reputable publishers require that such content be set off in a different typeface, and they put out the word that their covers and content are not for sale. In other words, you don’t need to read the fine print to know you’ve just read an ad. But Ratcliffe makes the important point that with advertorials, the advertiser controls the content of the message – something that doesn’t happen with the paid-bloggers program.

Renee Blodgett, head of her own San Francisco public relations firm, said that the Marqui program was a controversial item at both the recent Blog Business Summit and Blog University conferences. “I think most of the marketing world has decided to take a different approach: Instead of paying bloggers, you establish relationships and engage those bloggers who are care deeply about the industry that impacts you or your clients.”

Rubel, the Manhattan marketing executive, said the current advertising landscape is filled with “256 shades of gray,” and notes that corporations that have ventured into the blogosphere have generally stumbled, as when Dr Pepper/Seven Up enlisted six teen bloggers to write about a new flavored milk drink called Raging Cow without mentioning their ties to the company; Mazda tried to launch a viral marketing campaign with a fake blog; Warner Bros. began posting blog comments with gushing praise for new WB bands; and McDonald’s created a fake Lincolnfry blog as part of an ad campaign.

But Rubel saw many opportunities for new ad models as long as they keep faith with the reader. “I could see bloggers signing major endorsement deals,” he said. Why not have Adobe pay the author of a Photoshop book to blog about best practices? Why shouldn’t Microsoft give out 500 free copies of the Tablet PC to movers and shakers in the tech world, no strings attached?

Boyd was less sanguine about the volatile mix of content and commerce. He made no predictions about the future of paid-blogging programs but said, “The trouble with opening up Pandora’s box is that it’s impossible to get all the plagues back inside.”

The idea that paid-blogger programs will revolutionize blog commerce – that it will blow away the traditional model of advertising – seems unlikely. More likely is the notion that this may help usher in a new era of experimentation with commerce and content.

In many ways, the fuzzy world of sponsored content is not a new dilemma. In the late 1990s, the American Society of Magazine Editors established guidelines for separating advertising from editorial in online publications. (“On all online pages, there shall be a clear distinction made through words, design, placement, or any other effective method-between editorial and advertising content.”) In 1999, the Internet Content Coalition set out to devise a set of guidelines for presenting advertising online.

But hard-and-fast rules have not yet formed. It was only two months ago that Forbes magazine abandoned the policy of inserting advertising links into editorial content – an ethically dubious practice even though it was disclosed.

One cautionary tale that potential blog sponsors might bear in mind came in 1999 at the Los Angeles Times. The paper’s journalists were assigned to write about the new Staples Center sports arena for a special issue of its Sunday magazine. Without the newsroom’s knowledge, the newspaper and Staples Center had agreed to split the ad revenue from the issue – a too-cozy arrangement whose revelation became one of the biggest media scandals of the past decade. The arrangement, which led in part to the downfall of publisher Mark Willes, blurred the line between commerce and editorial and violated the spirit of the paper’s implicit compact with its readers – even had it been disclosed in advance.

But blogs are not newspapers with the same traditions and set of reader expectations. It may be that the Marqui program needs only a bit of fine-tuning. Here are some suggestions:

First, disclosure of the payment arrangement between client and blogger ought to be mandatory, not optional – for both parties’ sakes.

Second, now that the initial experimental phase is over, the content needs to be demarcated in a consistent way. Liz Lawley has blazed the trail smartly, adding a “sponsored content” label as part of the headline and a box around each sponsored post. (Ratcliffe points out that half the people who read his posts never visit his site but receive the content through RSS feeds – hence the need for a text disclaimer as well as a visual cue.) Even Corante permits sponsored content – for example, Jabber pays people to blog on Corante when attending a conference – but the blog entries are set off so they’re clearly differentiated from the rest of the site’s content.

Third, bloggers should not be added or dropped based on positive coverage they’ve provided or based on whether they’re willing to write editorial product reviews (favorable or unfavorable).

Fourth, and finally, let’s get something straight. If bloggers are paid by a corporation to write about the company, they’re no longer acting as amateur journalists. Journalists cannot and do not accept payments from sources.

Bloggers, on the other hand, are free to do so, and it’s up to each reader to decide how to judge that. “If you’re a blogger or writer, OK, take the money,” Rubel said. “But understand that you’ve crossed a line with some readers.”

Just don’t call yourself a journalist when you’re cashing that check.

J.D. Lasica’s book about the personal media revolution, “Darknet,” will be published in May 2005. Disclosure: The writer is working with Marc Canter on Ourmedia.org, a nonprofit grassroots media effort. Canter was involved in promoting the Marqui initiative in the blogosphere; Ourmedia is not connected with such efforts.

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