Tech Blog Payola
The good news: This latest news of unsavory editorial practices among a small subset of tech review sites is unlikely to draw the FCCs crosshairs towards the internet. The bad news: A small subset of tech review sites are practicing dabbling in some unsavory we’ll-give-you-edit-copy-if-you-buy-an-ad schemes — as in, web edit payola.
Tech Daily went “undercover” (basically posing as a mock consumer tech company) and querried editors about their willingness to run reviews in return for ad sales. This is somewhat disgusting, but nothing new. The New York Times ran a story earlier this year about movie review sites doing just the same thing. It’s also far from widespread: According to TD, only 22% of the sites were willing to play for pay, and that minority represented the smaller of the sites. And therein lies the likely culprit: Smaller sites are usually run by an extremely small staff — in some cases, a staff of one, who functions as the writer, editor AND publisher. It’s hard enough to enforce the sacred division of church and state with a staff of several; such business/edit schizophrenia is probably impossible to maintain by a one-man-shop. And pay-for-play might be a reason why one-man-shops will remain so.
Here’s my bigger issue with tech review land (and we’re all guilty of this at some point): With so many products cycling through the office for review, it’s far to easy to lose touch of the actual value of a gizmo to a consumer. (I’ve been lucky to have always worked with editors and writers who paid special attention to this aspect of a product — that readers might very well be parting with their hard-earned-cash based on our recommendation. Sometimes this leads to the opposite effect: The best-performing product might not get top billing simply because it costs twice as much as the almost-as-good runner-up. That’s good service journalism. But every so often I come across that glowing review of that time-to-take-out-a-second-mortgage gizmomatic, and I have to wonder if the review would be so glowing if the writers had to shell out the cash to buy the product. Of course, if that were the case, there’d be no tech editors.
