Rosie's Ramblings

By Sandra Rosenzweig
     
      The Crumbling Wall
      I've been a writer and editor for about twice as long as there have been personal computers. And in those long-ago days, I learned a set of principles?some call them ethics?that I, and most old-fart journalists, still adhere to. One of the first things I was taught was to protect the editorial content from any influence by the sales side and their clients, the advertisers. Borrowing a term from the worlds of law, finance, and network security, you could call this concept of editorial isolationism a firewall. (In my day, the ad sales department was all the way across the office from editorial. Or perhaps upstairs, where there was a better view.)
      Many of us old trouts complain that today all publishing, but especially online publishing, is too sloppy?no fact checkers to confirm assertions of fact, no reporters to confirm news developments with a minimum of three different sources, often no editors to correct writers' word usage, spelling (someone save me from another "seperate"), syntax, and grammar. However, the principles I've followed all this time still color every judgment I make: things like free speech, accuracy in reporting ... and maintaining that wall. In the olden days, magazines with standards would never let the "space reps" promise an advertiser that its kitchen curtain ads would be placed next to a story on a new printing technique from some textile mill. We used to believe that such ad placement called the article's reliability and neutrality into question. We didn't want our readers to believe that an advertiser told us to give the impression that Idea XYZ is what we really believe and advise. (Can you believe there are still readers who come up to me to ask a question about one of my "articles" (editorial) when they're actually referring to a paid ad (sales)? I don't even want to go there ...)
      Now, with online journalism, advertisers and marketing companies have found new ways to stick their ads in our faces. Take Google. Remember when Google had just hit the big time and people wondered how it would make any money? Very early on in Google's rise to power, it figured out a way to put ads on each page of search hits. And soon after that, how to put localized ads on each results page. Have you ever wondered what other private information (besides location) they gather on users? (I know, I know?if I don't like it, find another search engine. Yeah, right. Do you have any recommendations?) If people can't even tell the difference between an ad and editorial content, how are they going to know that a sponsored site that looks an awful lot like a search result is just an ad with a premium charge for placement?
      At least I don't have to click on one of those ads. And I can even use a few settings and add-ons in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Opera to avoid them altogether. (See "A Golden Tip in a Review?" page 34 for an example.) But what if an ad is buried in the editorial content? How many people are savvy enough to understand that those green underlined or double-underscored words are links to commercial websites? That the marketing company?I'll use IntelliTXT as an example because it's been picked on these past few months?creates links to advertiser websites and then attaches them to keywords on original, supposedly editorial, websites. Talk about placement.
      But what I really want to know is this: How complicit are the websites that use (and get paid for) these links? In my mind, they're much more corrupt than the marketing firms. Greed has overwhelmed their sense of responsibility to provide fair, unbiased, and thorough coverage to their readers. How can you trust them?
     

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