To illustrate this basic point, here is a personal e-mail sent to me minutes after Pickrell had come off the phone from talking with Barbaro:
Well, I just got off the phone with Michael Barbaro, the New York Times guy working on a piece about the relationship between Wal-Mart and bloggers. He's preparing, in my opinion, a hit piece that will go after blogs AND Wal-Mart. I told him in no uncertain terms that nobody writes for me, except me. Yet he kept asking the same question over and over again, that some things I have written were close to what Wal-Mart has circulated in email updates.When I asked him to point them out, he showed me the areas....all of them in the quote box. I said that's what the quote box is: it shows that I am quoting somebody...it means that I didn't write it. He asked if I was getting emails from Marshall Manson, a blogger that "works" for Wal-Mart. I said yes, I got one not long after my first post about Wal-Mart asking if I wanted to be sent updates. To tell the truth, I don't even recall if I responded to it or not.
It is a great shame to Barbaro and The Times that the erstwhile business reporter chose to concentrate his article on such an obvious flaw in comprehension of the New Media, for this might have been a relevant, lively think-piece about the tactics being increasingly employed by large organisations to market their message to a wider audience: he could have still maintained the same stance against PR to bloggers and got away with this.
Instead, it looks like Barbaro needs to go back to journalism school and get to grips with the fundamentals of a technology even most teenagers know now how to interpret.
Article comments
1 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
The Old Grey Lady
She ain't what she used to be,
Many years before.
2 - Crazy Politico
I too was interviewed, and willingly contributed to his story. One of things he left out were comments by myself and others that newspapers often use PR releases as the basis for a story, either good or bad about a company. Jeff Jarvis made that point very well talking about this issue last night on CNBC's Closing Bell.
In any type of journalism a tip is a tip, whether it's from a junkie on the corner talking about police beat downs, or a corporate suit and tie sending out PR stuff about his company.
He missed the point on most of my Wal-Mart posts, which weren't as much praise for Wal-Mart as deriding the Anti-Wally World crowd for their basic lack of knowledge on retailing and economics in general.
3 - Scott Butki
Sorry I didn't realize you'd written a follow up piece and I wrote a few comments on the other site, which I'll copy over here now:
To wit:
Biggest story of the year?
Um, yeah.
That whole Valerie Plame thing is so not a story anymore.
Here's a good take on the issue.
Like it or not the Times reporter seesm to be pointing a valid complaint about bloggers doing what sloppy journalists also do - digesting and hten giving to the readers that which is spoon fed to them.
4 - Daniel M. Harrison
"Like it or not the Times reporter seesm to be pointing a valid complaint about bloggers doing what sloppy journalists also do - digesting and hten giving to the readers that which is spoon fed to them."
Given the context, not really. All of these blogs are Republican publications with a bias towards free-market agendas: if a company, or a political party, says "hey, we see you're interested in what we're doing as an individual/consumer, we'll send you some more stuff/updates", the blogger knows:
1. This is obviously biased information as it comes directly from the source seeking to promote themselves
2. This is most likely fitting with an agenda they hold anyway, so it just makes for enhanced storytelling/concepts.
I think what is most telling is that organisations - be they political or corporate - see blogs as a worthy enough medium now to pay attention to: this Michael barbaro could have written about. had he done so, he might have covered the ethical questions of organisation reaching out to the consumer, instead of just to journalists, and it would have been a fair piece, but as it is, he misunderstood completely what a "quote box" was.
It was sloppy journalism, and it was a shame, because this could have been a fascinating think-piece, as i said in the follow-up.
5 - Scott Butki
So you have no problem with Bill Pickroll quoting directly from a press release from Wal-Mart without acknowledging that to his readers?
You talk about the difference between old and new media - focusing on the quotebook - but leave out a much more important detail: A Similarity between old and new media - agenda-setting.
Just as politicians on the right and Chomsky on the left used to complain that the newspapers and tv setting were setting the days agenda by choosing what stories to cover so do blogs set agendas by choosing what they write about.
So is Wal-Mart attempting to set the agenda as far as bloggers are concerned? Sure sounds to me like the answer is yes whether it's receiving emails or quoting press releases or quoting it in a text box.
Is that bad? Well, it depends on how open they are about that with their readers.
If I was reading a blogger who was paying more attention to pro-walmart statements than anti-wal mart stances and thus biased due to laziness or other reasons I'd like to know that.
When I read a blogger I assume he or she has thought through an issue and is sharing a position, as opposed to just printing what they just got by email.
Tell me where I'm wrong please and we can start from there.
And yes, even the selection of quotes in a quotebox can be letting Wal-Mart successfully use a blogger's credibility to try to its point across.
The question I'd ask is whether the quotebox sometimes contains quotes from opponents of Wal-Mart.
6 - Scott Butki
Good piece on all of this over here at Buzzmachine.