Marqui Program: Hot Air?

By Richard Koman - February 3, 2005

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

Marqui's program of paying bloggers to mention the company on their blogs has resulted in mostly a lot of "introspective blather," in the opinion of Marc Canter, the genius behind the program. The point of the program, after all, isn't to be the center of a storm of inside baseball chatter but rather to close sales and recruit developers.

In the case of this Marqui program - the company missed the notion that we were setting up a pipeline - explicitely for the purpose of getting compelling stories and usage sceanrios out into our bloggers blogs.

With a piepline established - not only the corporate message - but success stories and on-going updates could be fed to our paid bloggers - utilzing their intellect and feedback to spread the Marqui meme.


But instead the entire program - up until now - has been filled with "talking about talking" - internal retrospective kind of blabber - which is typcial blogosphere filler - but not what we were hoping for.

But you can't blame our bloggers. They haven't really had anything to write about. That pisses me off. I'm bummed that Marqui hasn't come through with more compelling stories for our bloggers to blog about.

If anything, the entire incident provides a pretty compelling answer to the question, are bloggers journalists? The answer is simply no, because if you're willing to take money (and this was easy money) to run articles than you do not subscribe to accepted journalistic ethical standards. The fact that the content was not dictated by the advertiser doesn't change the basic fact that the advertiser is controlling the editorial agenda.

Of course, bloggers don't have the luxury of a steady paycheck that employed journalists do. They have to figure out how to go out and hustle up a business model. In that sense they are publishers as well as writers, which doesn't mean they can't maintain separation of church and state; small town publishers have been doing it for most of the past century.

Marqui-advertising blogger Richard MacManus makes the great point that the leading opponents of the program -- Jason Calcanis (publisher of weblogs.inc) and Stowe Boyd (publisher of Corante) -- have a vested interest in the discussion:

I can understand why Jason and Stowe are so upset about the Marqui program: it threatens their business model. Both of them use blogs, very successfully I might add, as the foundation of their publishing empires. So the last thing they want is for weblogs to become, or appear to become, impure or tainted. That's not a good look when trying to attract advertisers and audiences.

Which of course is the reason that ethical standards were created in the first place. Roll back 100 years and you'll have no trouble finding publishers, editors and journalists who exchanged positive coverage for advertising from the railroads, taking bribes from politicians, using news pages to further the economic benefit of publishers, and so on. The only reason ethical standards exist is because it makes sound business sense to have them.

All of which makes it interesting that Boyd is considering running an event in which he debates the Marqui issue with Canter, since such an event comes with a tempting little plum: Marqui would like to sponsor the debate. Boyd finds this "an interesting moral dilemma: Corante will be getting paid by Marqui to promote a debate on the pros and cons of Marquiism. Is this one of those Jesuitical compromises, where we are putting the end before the means?"

As a leading publisher with a lot riding on his personal reputation, Boyd might look to his own position on Marqui spam:

"It breaks a implicit covenant between blogger and community, where the words written express the authentic interests of the blogger, not an exchange of blog entry real estate for fees."

From the perspective of mainstream media rules, Marqui is engaged in a campaign of buying editorial airtime, and any coverage that marries coverage of the company or its campaign with money from the company is tainted and suspect. But perhaps the rules of the broadcast-mode media (we report, you read) don't apply to the conversation-mode media. Perhaps bloggers will have to come up with their own ethical standards. But if they do, it won't be because someone wrote up a Blogger's Standards of Ethical Behavior. It will be because people kept pushing the edges and found out where the backlash lay. The hard way.


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By Richard Koman - February 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comment | Category:
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Comments (2)

Elizabeth Albrycht:

Hi Richard,

You use three labels here: Journalist, blogger and publisher. Each seems to have a definition and an ethical stance associated with it, if only by implication. Journalists have some standard guidelines developed over time. Bloggers have highly individualized guidelines which are still in development and subject to change/debate. What I am not sure about is "publisher" as you are using it. Are you setting this category up as some kind of third option? Not as tied to ethical standards as journalists are but perhaps more institutionalized than bloggers, so thus with different ethical requirements?

I might be reading too much into this, but I think you might be getting at something interesting here. The journalist - blogger divide is not the only divide, and even, perhaps, not the most interesting or fruitful one for examining the entire plethora of emerging biz models (and their associated ethical constraints).

Posted: February 3, 2005 4:12 AM

Richard Koman:

Hi Elizabeth,

So my father in law started a community newspaper in Milpitas, CA, 40 years ago. He was the publisher and editor. That meant he was out there selling ads and writing stories about the community, which sometimes meant writing stories about advertisers. He certainly provided advertorial opportunities and probably applied a not to doubtful eye on some manufactured news events ("Pancake Breakfast at Milpitas Chevy"), but he had to work out some reasonable policies between keeping advertisers happy and the independence of his editorial.

Ultimately, he knew it was all about becoming a trusted voice to community residents, and if he did that he would command the eyeballs that the advertisers were paying for.

In the beginning this was something he just had to play as he went. Before long, he was a member of the Cal. Newspaper Publishers Association, and he could rely on the standards and policies created by the big guys.

To me, bloggers are writer/publishers (let's just leave journalism out of it for now). They write; they hustle. For now they have to work out the balance. If someone had offered Mort money to run an article, any article, on his company, I think he would have said, "why dont you write it yourself, pay me, and I'll put ADVERTISING on the top of it."

The new publishers will have to figure it out all over again.

Posted: February 3, 2005 10:54 AM