Blogging for Dollars

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Reply-To: <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 20:23:39 -0800
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Blogging for Dollars

[Note:  This item comes from reader Mike Cheponis.  DLH]

Blogging for Dollars
Hang Daily Kos, but not for taking money from Howard Dean.
By Chris Suellentrop
Posted Friday, Jan. 14, 2005, at 6:52 PM PT
<http://slate.msn.com/id/2112314/>

Journalists think blogging makes everyone one of them, but not everyone
wants to be a journalist. That's the lesson from a long-running
discussion among prominent political bloggers that spilled into the
pages of the Friday Wall Street Journal. The Journal's lede: "Howard
Dean's presidential campaign hired two Internet political 'bloggers' as
consultants so that they would say positive things about the former
governor's campaign in their online journals, according to a former
high-profile Dean aide." The "high-profile aide" is Zephyr Teachout,
the former head of Internet outreach for Dean. Teachout earlier this
week blogged on the subject of "Financially Interested Blogging." She
wrote, in part, "In this past election, at least a few prominent
bloggers were paid as consultants by candidates and groups they
regularly blogged about."

Teachout named two prominent bloggers in particular: Jerome Armstrong
of myDD.com and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Daily Kos. "On Dean's
campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely
in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean. We paid
them over twice as much as we paid two staffers of similar backgrounds,
and they had several other clients," Teachout wrote. "While they ended
up also providing useful advice, the initial reason for our outreach
was explicitly to buy their airtime. To be very clear, they never
committed to supporting Dean for the payment‹but it was very clearly,
internally, our goal." In the past, Teachout has also fingered Matthew
Gross for writing about Erskine Bowles while Gross was on the
candidate's payroll.

  Armstrong and Moulitsas have complained vociferously on their blogs
about Teachout's post and about the Journal's story, and they have a
point: Armstrong quit blogging for the half-year that Armstrong Zunida,
the two men's political consulting firm, was on the Dean payroll, and
Moulitsas posted a somewhat grumpy disclosure on his site's front page
during the same period. If the two men were journalists, those
disclosures would be woefully insufficient. But Armstrong and Moulitsas
aren't journalists. Nor does having a blog make someone a journalist.

[snip]

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