Saturday, January 15, 2005

Should we be worrying about bloggers on the payroll?

Since the Armstrong Williams scandal broke, there has been a lot of talk about ethics in the blogosphere and paid blogging. For example, this post from yesterday at Slant Point.

I really don't think that paid blogging is the big problem that some people are making it out to be. There are only a tiny number of blogs that have enough readership to make it worth anyone's while to actually pay them money to blog something.

Is anyone going to pay me money to reach my 300 visitors a day? I think not.

If you want to be sure that you're reading unbought opinions, then read small blogs like mine instead of big blogs like Instapundit or Power Line.

1 comment:

mikeca said...

I think the WSJ article is a very poorly researched, politically biased piece. The authors were looking for something that some liberal had done that they could claim was similar to the Armstrong Williams case. They got their facts all wrong. I have seen an email from someone who worked for the Dean Campaign that indicates that another WSJ reporter had called to do some fact checking on this article and confirmed that the reporters simply had the facts wrong. The WSJ went ahead and ran the story anyway. If it is true, that the WSJ fact checked this story, found out it was wrong, and then ran the story anyway, this is a worse example of political bias than Rathergate.

Who is going to be fired from the WSJ for this story?