Tag: blogs

MORE BLOGGER ETHICS THOUGHTS

Women_and_workjpg THIS IS FROM MORRA’S  VERY FINE AND ALWAYS THOUGHTFUL WOMEN AND WORK BLOG, IN A POST ENTITLED:  "With all due respect Cindy."  Comments are closed on this post so I’m quoting her post here and then posting a response. 

MORRA:  "First off, I don’t have a Typekey account, so I am going to do a trackback instead.
Cindy Samuels, who is brilliant, is wrong on this post:"
“One of my favorite bloggers sent me a note asking my opinion about a service that pays bloggers to  write about client products.  It’s not secret, the writers disclose their contracts.  Even so, I told her that as an old newsie, I thought that, unless she was desperate for money, she shouldn’t go near the idea.  WHY?”
AFTER THE QUOTE, SHE ADDED"Journalists do endorsements, why can’t I? Not that anyone’s asking, of course."

Morra, who unlike me really IS brilliant, asks a fair question.  But I don’t think reputable journalists endorse products.  They don’t do commercials and use their own language to sell products.  If they are busy selling in the context of their coverage – or we are, in the context of our blogs, then why should anyone believe us about anything?  How do they know which things are paid for and which are not?  When is a blog a blog and when does it become solely a marketing tool? 

I may be showing my age, since I was trained as a reporter long ago, but I shudder to think of the consequences of putting PAID ad copy into a post.  Let’s keep this conversation going – I respect Morra too much to do anything but think harder about this…..

ALL POWER (or at least MORE power) TO THE BLOGGERS!

I_want_you

Yesterday I went to a briefing on political blogging held by the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet and mega-PR agency Edelman Associates.  It was pretty interesting.  Among the findings: (Read to the bottom – you’ll be glad you did)

  • 27% of the US population reads a blog in any given week (@60,193,913 folks – larger than the adult pops of CA, NY, TX combined)34%+ American influentials (people who influence others – logical, right?) read a blog at least once/week
  • 28% of American adults that have read a blog have taken action on based on in- formation they received on that blog. 

The US age breakdown is kind of interesting too.

  • 18-24s are largest blog users, as you’d imagine.  They report reading a blog an average of 1.6 days/week. 
  • The next highest isn’t 25-34 (many of whom fell into a kind of "gap" in school computing access and average 0.8 pages/week) but 35-44s who average around 1.05 days/week.
  • Then there’s another surprise – the next age cadre, 45-54 is lowest so far at around 0.7 days/week
  • Those early Boomers 55-64 are higher, matching the 25-34s at 0.8. 
  • 65+ averages only around 0.5.

And gender – are we traveling the blogosphere less intensely than the guys?  Well the only stats the report had were for political blogs and their researcher says the numbers were pretty much in the margin of error: 

  • Blog readers who read political blogs:  24% female – 30% male
  • Take action from political blog info: 26% female – 30% male]]

A second study, released in October 2006 by IPDI and @dvocacy Inc. showed:

  • Daily political blog readers were 75% male and 25% female
  • Daily “all others” blog readers were 60% male and 40% female

OK NOW here’s why you read to the bottom:  women don’t do their politics exclusively on “political” blogs – not at all!  Read Been There or Mom-101 or Lizawashere and see for yourself.  As usual, we don’t fit into anyone’s categories – combining family, food, politics and love into the total life we all live.  Good for us — we just have to make sure the pundits know this too – so they can find some of our brilliant sisters as they think, write and provoke us to do both better.