{"id":237,"date":"2009-01-05T13:10:46","date_gmt":"2009-01-05T18:10:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/?p=237"},"modified":"2009-01-05T13:12:04","modified_gmt":"2009-01-05T18:12:04","slug":"free-newspaper-paid-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/2009\/01\/05\/free-newspaper-paid-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Free newspaper &#8212; paid news?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>Dear Tina Chadha and Editors of (Boston) Metro,<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/files\/2009\/01\/metroadvertorial.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-238\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/files\/2009\/01\/metroadvertorial-276x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"276\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<div>I&#8217;m not a regular reader of Metro but I happened to flip through today&#8217;s issue while on the Green line. On the &#8220;Careers and Wealth&#8221; page I found a text by Ms. Chadha &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.metrobostonnews.com\/us\/article\/2009\/01\/04\/22\/3844-72\/index.xml\">Use the Internet to keep on track<\/a>&#8221;\u00a0 which describes a single product by the Behance\u00a0network in glowing terms. It includes\u00a0\u00a03 graphic elements: a\u00a0picture of the current product and its earlier incarnation and a little button that says &#8220;Learn more at behance.net&#8221; which is\u00a0the website of the company, not of your publication or some independent or generic organization. (The online version has no graphics, but the text includes a clickable link to the website for the product.) I&#8217;m unable to see what distinguishes this item from a marketing pitch for a commercial product. Is it in fact an advertisement? Did Behance compensate Ms. Chadha or Metro for this piece? If so, what is Metro&#8217;s policy about labelling such &#8220;advertiorial&#8221; content? In a brief search, I didn&#8217;t see anything that looked like an ethics policy on your site to help readers figure out what your policy about paid articles might be.<\/div>\n<div>If the company didn&#8217;t pay for this excellent promotion,\u00a0you&#8217;re doing yourselves a huge disservice by not writing the article in a way that makes that clear. Even more so if Ms. Chadha actually &#8220;reported&#8221;\u00a0this story rather than just re-writing a\u00a0helpful press release.<\/div>\n<div>Feel free to post your response in the comments field on my blog &#8211;\u00a0 I notice you don&#8217;t have comments enabled on your site, which is a pity.<\/div>\n<div>Best,<\/div>\n<p>Persephone Miel<\/p>\n<p>Image &#8211; my own snapshot of the paper version of Metro, since the online version doesn&#8217;t have the graphics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dear Tina Chadha and Editors of (Boston) Metro, I&#8217;m not a regular reader of Metro but I happened to flip through today&#8217;s issue while on the Green line. On the &#8220;Careers and Wealth&#8221; page I found a text by Ms. Chadha &#8220;Use the Internet to keep on track&#8221;\u00a0 which describes a single product by the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1659,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1751,2468],"tags":[4075,2125,4077,4076],"class_list":["post-237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advertising","category-credibility-is-critical","tag-advertorial","tag-ethics","tag-journalism-ethics","tag-metro"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1659"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mediarepublic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}