Imagine if the same situation can happen, not in a trivial household product, but perhaps in more important cases, such as politics? How about if I want to influence a political campaign and rely on blogs to make "X" candidate look "good", at least online? From our readings, "Here Comes Everybody", the author makes a case that "mass amateurization" has made it easy for anybody to become a news outlet. That change has made professional writers (newspapers, tv) lose control of what makes something "newsworthy". How about the standards that were established by media professionals? Those are gone too and that could be dangerous. This is why I think "branding" will still have a great influence in the future. I believe people will still believe that a good brand is usually providing a better product. That's why, most people trust the New York Times, not the New York Post.
Monday, February 1, 2010
On Line Reviews
If you haven't read Andrew Menendez' blog on "on line reviews", you should take a look at it. I won't go into the specifics, but he discusses why reviewers should not get compensated by receiving the products that they blog about. The main issue here, as you may have already guess, is credibility. Amazon has a program called Amazon Vine that according to them, "enables a select group of Amazon customers to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make educated purchase decisions." Amazon provides its members free copies of those products . Conflict of interest?
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Good points Roberto. Even our APOC readings have little emphasis on "source." We just click over, read, take it as gospel, don't even bother to note WHO wrote it and what their credentials are. I think real journalists are going to have to work hard to distinguish themselves.
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