Corporate Sponsorship, Blogs, and Credibility

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Technology Thursday

Both the ScienceBlogs community and the BlogHer community are dealing with some challenges regarding corporate sponsorship. A number of bloggers are reconsidering their attendance at BlogHer because the conference accepted sponsorship from Nestle. Nestle, of course, has a long history of dubious practices with respect to how it markets its infant formula, particularly in developing countries. I'll link again to PhD in Parenting who describes her thought process about whether to attend:

I should, ideally, rescind my Speaker’s Agreement and refuse to attend the conference. However, BlogHer is not about Nestle. It is about us: the blogging community. I feel that if I refuse to attend BlogHer, Nestle will have won because it will still be there and yet my opportunity to tell my fellow bloggers why advocacy is important will be missed, as will my opportunity to learn to improve and strengthen my advocacy. I feel like I can, due to the nature of BlogHer, attend the conference and still protest Nestle’s presence there

Some quick Googling suggests that not a lot of attendees are going to boycott, but this longtime Nestle boycotter has canceled her speaking engagement at BlogHer:

Easiest of all: Hello? Forty years? Boycott? Nestle not listening? Nestle couldn’t care less about me. My attending or not attending isn’t going to affect anyone’s “bottom line.” But, I have to live with me. I have to look at myself in the mirror. I have to “walk the walk” before my children, and that’s why I get the “big girl panties.” So, yeah, easy decision. Ugly dilemma. I hope BlogHer will rethink this strategy (and not just “tiers” or “tracks” but out and out “no thank you, Nestle!”). I’d love it if Nestle would rethink their whole strategy, too. Tasty chocolate doesn’t make up for infant deaths.

Another controversy in another part of the blogosphere erupted this week at ScienceBlogs. As @pourmecoffee put it on Twitter: "ScienceBlogs decided to sponsor a blog on nutrition written by PepsiCo, and all hell broke loose." Scientists tend not to like having their credibility put into question by virtue of unasked-for association with corporate interests. This is a separate question from whether the scientists who work at PepsiCo do good science or not. Carl Zimmer writes:

Even if you set aside the paradox of Pepsi telling us about eating right (Step 1: maybe put down that 10 liter bottle of Pepsi?), this just doesn’t make sense editorially. If you want to sustain respect and trust in readers, you simply can’t do this sort of thing. John Rennie and Paul Raeburn explain this Journalism 101 lesson.

What I find particularly galling about this whole affair is that bloggers who don’t want to associate themselves with this kind of nonsense have to go through the hassle of leaving Scienceblogs and setting up their blog elsewhere. The technical steps involved may be wonderfully easy now (export files, open account on Wordpress, import), but the social steps remain tedious. Take it from me, someone who has moved his blog three times over the past six years: your readers lose your trail, and it takes a long time for Google to start helping them. These folks did nothing to deserve this irritation.

While I am, most days, an extremely grumpy critic of most traditional media and what passes for "journalism" these days, I thought the concluding line of this post as spot on. After observing that "old media" have long had practices to clearly disclose advertising content, Paul Raeburn notes:

The folks at ScienceBlogs would do well to take a look at these guidelines. Sometimes old media has something important to say to new media. This is one of those times.

I think both of these cases present the individual participants (conference attendees, science bloggers) with vexing dilemmas. And I don't have anything particularly profound to conclude. I have more sympathy for the BlogHer conference organizers soliciting sponsorships than I do for the ScienceBlogs folks avoiding explicit disclosure (avoiding it at first anyway, there are suggestions that they'll be more explicit). I do find the discussions fascinating, though. And emblematic of new challenges as the lines blur between publishers, editors, writers, funders and as discerning credibility becomes an increasing challenge for readers.

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Some tangentially-related reading, that I share just because I thought these posts were interesting:

RC3: Two companies that don't understand identity - discusses how ScienceBlogs really misunderstood their contributors and their audience.

Moxie: Don't hassle Mamas for feeding their babies! Period. (My paraphrase, and I endorse this even though I have fairly strong views on this perpetual mommy-war topic.)

Comments

[Lyn]

Update: And.. just this morning ScienceBlogs has expelled PepsiCo: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/07/pepsico_has_been_expelled.php.

[Peter]

You manage to misunderstand almost everything about advertising and sponsorship. New media (sic) is cheaper than old media (sic), and has allowed itself to get too close to advertising. At the same time, it is easier to reject advertising just because of that cheapness. However, to think that advertising or sponsorship infects or affects the vehicle it supports is to give the sort of credibility to advertising that would make its owners grin from ear to ear. Content is king. Keep it separate from the stuff that pays for it, take the money and smile politely. Worry about something serious. Scientists (and people who write things like this: Scientists tend not to like having their credibility put into question by virtue of unasked-for association with corporate interests.) who worry about nasty company X or brand Y getting too close are just a bunch of precious tarts. Get back to the lab and invent something, ffs. I mean, it's not as if they are gaining financially from the association, they are just rejecting a source of money that keeps their platform intact. Science Blogs must feel even more self-important now that they have 'expelled' Pepsi. One question, and please answer honestly: who loses?

[Lyn]

I find the suggestion that advertising and sponsorship have no effect on what they support to be.. well.. it made me giggle.

[Peter]

give an example of where it has happened with auditable figures

[Lyn]

A quick (as in, I spent 20 seconds) Google search led to this 2008 literature review of advertiser influence on news media -

http://www.pdfdownload.org/pdf2html/pdf2html.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmembers.cox.net%2Fkellyecampbell%2Fportfolio%2Flitrev.pdf&images=yes

Whether it's good scholarship or not I don't have time to dig into, but it does cite, among other things, a 92 study in which 1/3 of editors surveyed admitted that advertising influences news content. If editors themselves admit it, why argue with them?

There's also the much-discussed struggle that Ms. Magazine went through in sorting out whether to accept advertising.

Then there are the constant dilemmas medical researchers and medical journals face regarding drug company sponsorship.

It would be nice to live in a world where money (or the prospect of money, or the prospect of losing money) had no sway over anyone. It's a lovely and optimistic view of human nature and I wish it were so. Alas, this is not that world.

[Peter]

One editor from The Washington Post is quoted as saying, "They think because they buy thousands of dollars worth of advertising it is their section and they can tell us what we should put in it."
Given these findings, it may be that the more money an advertiser spends with an organization, the more influence that advertiser has over editorial content.

and

Given these findings, it may be that publications and broadcasts that specialize in certain topic areas or focus on specific industries may be more susceptible to advertiser influence ....

Hardly conclusive, is it? It may be? And your study sees 2/3 of editors admitting that advertising does not influence news content. If editors themselves admit it, why argue with them?

My point of view is based on 15 years' as a journalist, admittedly not in the heady world of the US media. My backwater used to be known as Fleet Street. In my world, any suggestion that we should modify or not run an item because of advertiser pressure would and was given the treatment it deserved - and this is in the context of an advertising sales executive worrying about his/her second bite at the cake, never an overt approach by an advertiser, by the way.

And thanks for the lesson in what is and what is not reality. Money does indeed make the world go round. But there are fewer monsters hiding under my bed than I suspect are under yours.