RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

Dave and NPR

I am not sure what sparked Dave Winer's comments about National Public Radio, but they are way off base. I've been close to an NPR station for a number of years and they simply do not "sell speaking spots." Furthermore, I have heard both national and local NPR broadcasts disclose potential conflicts, such as when reporting about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's gifts to fight malaria the other day, when All Things Considered's anchor said something to the effect of "we are obliged to say that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supports coverage of health issues on this program."

Dave recently discovered that potential conference sponsors want something for their money. Having produced a goodly number of conferences in my day, this is hardly news. This raises the question of what Dave's BloggerCon event will be, a discussion of "authenticity of voice" and "no shills" or a quasi-religious revival of Dave's definition of a blog. He assumes blogging is journalism, but that's like saying that all music is rock and roll. This thing I am typing into now is a tool that can be applied to various modes of expression, not just journalism. What I think Dave means is that we are increasingly living life on the record -- this is something that professional journalists, who do withhold comments made by sources in order to maintain relationships, have to understand. Even our sources can scoop us now, reaching a large audience at a very low cost compared to the cost of publishing, for instance, a newspaper.

What Dave is finding out is that money comes at a price, the reality that publishers and journalists have lived with for ages. The challenge is to find ways to articulate what value there is in what Dave describes as an "appropriate (unspecified) way to thank the sponsors for their contribution." NPR has a very clear way of thanking sponsors -- they do so by name at the top and bottom of the hour. That hardly makes NPR shills for corporate America -- what sometimes makes NPR seem to be shills for corporate America is the occasions when editorial judgment lapses and marketing messages become news. But, they are two different things, these acknowledgments and the lapses in judgment made by all people, not just journalists, occasionally.

This is the reason that there is an ethical code for journalism and that, when acting as a journalist a blogger needs to be aware of and acknowledge. Dave and I have agreed on this for a long time, but it isn't something that should define all blogging. Nothing and no one should define all blogging, nor any other medium. It should all be open to citizens to use to communicate, and as cost barriers fall because of digitization, they will increasingly be opened to novel use by individuals and companies.