Influence and principles in the blogosphere

The Online Journalism Review has just posted my story about the ethics of bloggers and other key influencers receiving payments or freebies from commercial interests. (Note to OJR: try to start publishing stories in the morning rather than the late afternoon; you’ll get much more mileage.)

The article — Influence peddling in the blogosphere. What are the ethical standards bloggers follow when offered payments or freebies for buzz? — surveys the slippery question of when and whether journalistic standards of propriety apply to bloggers. Excerpt:

“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.”

It’s a subject with many shades of gray, and so it was much harder to write than I first imagined. The interviews with Stowe Boyd of Corante and Stephen King of Marqui (both pictured above) and several others were all fascinating, and I wish I had time to post them in full (alas, we’re in the home stretch on the Ourmedia.org project, and even fitting this article in was a stretch).

I come down somewhere in the middle: that bloggers who participate in programs like Marqui’s paid-bloggers experiment should be free to do so (though at the risk of losing the trust of some of their readers); that freebies-for-buzz programs like the Silicon Valley 100 aren’t much different than what we’ve seen companies do for years; but that both kinds of activities should be generally off-limits to journalists. I also suggest four ways in which Marqui could strengthen its program.

Yesterday, a writer at Lost Remote said there was no such thing as a “blogger ethic.” I disagree. In the article, and from four-plus years of blogging, I suggested that these norms are emerging:

Five principles of the blogosphere

1 . Disclose, disclose, disclose. Transparency – of actions, motives and financial considerations – is the golden rule of the blogosphere.

2. Follow your passions. Blog about topics you care deeply about.

3. Be honest. Write what you believe.

4. Trust your readers to form their own judgments and conclusions.

5. Reputation is the principal currency of cyberspace. Maintain your independence and integrity – lost trust is difficult to regain.

And, of course, you’re free to disagree, agree, or add your own norms or tenets. As I say, not everyone will abide by them, but I believe these are the customs that are emerging.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.