Interesting debate happening in one corner of the blogosphere (can somebody please come up with a better word for blogosphere? Pleeease?) at the moment: what to think of The World's Most Popular Weblog (TM) Boing Boing.
Glassdog (a snarky groupblog) recently ran a piece on Boing Boing (a snarky groupblog) and how it is plastered with advertising which might be affecting its image.
OK, fine. Boing Boing is profitable. Probably very profitable... So where's the money going?
Oh, wait, that's none of our business. Boing Boing isn't public. They, legally and ethically, owe nobody an explanation for what they do or how they do it.
Except it feels sort of wrong, doesn't it? It's got the same indie-Orwell feel that calling their business manager a "band manager" has: We're not corporate! We're rebels! We… make a lot of money. We just don't want look like it. Punk rock, dude!
Salient, though perhaps not entirely accurate - and to be taken with a pinch of salt since blogs are, of course, more prone to in-fighting than most media forms.
But then Phil Gyford (who we profiled last summer) weighs in with a far more meaty question: Does a successful weblog have to try harder to be accurate?
I can't help feeling that Boing Boing has stepped past the hazy mark where it can get away with publishing off-the-cuff posts about events in the world without spending some of the time and money we assume those ads are generating on checking facts.
It's a re-hash of the "Is blogging journalism?" argument, but in new terms. Does having enough money to go professional mean that you have to adopt professional standards?
As a kind of "professional blogger", I'm not sure what I think, but there are a few things to consider here.
- The professional press is not always accurate, and some publications are less accurate than others, sometimes wilfully so. However, there are supposedly checks and balances (and regulators) to even these problems out.
- Being partisan is not necessarily a bad thing, and neutrality isn't always interesting. We shouldn't imagine readers are thick-headed enough that they can't understand the difference - but we do have to realise that the confusion between news and opinion (and the circulation of rumour) does exist.
- But do those earning money from espousing a kind of pseudo-rebellious doctrine owe their readers the duty of staying truthful? After all, getting on the back of Big Media is one thing, but removing comments and not being transparent makes it awfully difficult to keep yourself openly accountable.
We're still feeling our way with all these things, and clearly as a professional journalist and blogger I'm in a slightly different position than most. I reckon we should try and be accurate, clear, transparent and accountable - whether we get paid or not. Why? Because we all have opinions, but the least readers deserve is enough of the truth to help make up their own minds.
After all, it was the legendary Guardian editor CP Scott who said "Comment is free, but facts are sacred", and that stands as true for webloggers as anybody else.
