If you’ve been reading GalleyCat for any amount of time, you likely know this already, but as the founding curator of the literary website Beatrice, when it comes to the new guidelines for bloggers put forward by the Federal Trade Commission, if I might be allowed to quote myself for a moment, “I’ve got a dog in this hunt.” (So as I write on this topic, it’s worth remembering that my positions are not entirely objective, and they aren’t necessarily those of mediabistro.com.) With that in mind, just as I believed that John Freeman was wrong to question the integrity of bloggers in 2006, I believe that the FTC is wrong in defining the fundamental relationship between book publishers and bloggers in 2009 as one of “advertiser” and “endorser.”
Furthermore, both Freeman and the FTC are wrong because they proceeded from the same flawed assumption: Their sensibilities apparently offended by the very notion of “buzz marketing,” they concluded that because some bloggers have participated in buzz marketing campaigns, any blogger who receives a consumer good, or is registered with an ecommerce affiliate program (or, in the FTC’s case, does so much as provide any link at all to an ecommerce site), must by definition be participating in some sort of marketing campaign. That assumption is insulting, and the double standard it establishes separating blogs from so-called “real” media is not only pernicious, it may well over time constitute an interference with the development of independent online media.
To return to yesterday’s question of readers’ reasonable expectations, I don’t think I’m out of line to suggest that the “best” bookblogs, such as The Elegant Variation or Maud Newton‘s website, enjoy the same quality of critical appreciation and respect as that enjoyed by any book review section in any major American newspaper, no matter how many “fans” any of them have. (The editors of the New York Times Book Review certainly seem to think so, since it’s given the creators of those particular blogs assignments.) If you accept that premise as true, I further suggest that “the weight or credibility of their endorsement,” to use the FTC’s language, has in no way been diminished by any “failure” on their part to disclose the provenance of the books they’ve discussed, any more than the NYTBR suffers a loss of credibility from its lack of disclosure to readers about how it gets the books it covers.
As I wrote of my own efforts at Beatrice, “whatever (undoubtedly limited) authority I have as a book critic/advocate… comes from doing the work day in, day out, and convincing one reader at a time that I have something to say worth paying attention to.” I work from the good faith assumption that readers are interested in hearing about (to use an utterly banal and reductive description) great books, and I would hope readers approach the site with an equal assumption of good faith towards my sincere desire to spread the word about books and authors I find noteworthy, just as they assume good faith on the part of the New York Times Book Review and its efforts to provide positive and negative critical commentary. (I made a conscious decision that life was too short for me to spend my free time on books I didn’t believe deserved wider audiences, which is why I don’t go negative much if at all anymore.)
Frankly, if readers aren’t coming to my site with some such assumption of good faith, I don’t want them as readers, and they’d probably be happier with some other blog. I’m willing to earn the trust of readers through the cumulative effect of my literary judgments—you either think I’ve got good taste when it comes to books or you don’t—but I see no reason to plead for that trust… especially when mainstream media outlets engaged in similar ventures don’t feel compelled (and, more importantly, aren’t compelled) to do so.
It’s been suggested to me repeatedly over the last two days that the sorts of disclosures the FTC will be requiring from bloggers are “no big deal” and that bloggers should welcome the opportunity to be more transparent with their readers. Well, first off, it isn’t an opportunity, it’s a mandate; more importantly, it’s a mandate based on a unrealistic approach to bloggers which, when it is given credibility through their compliance, even reluctant compliance, will threaten not only to stifle the growth of independent online media but may in the long run have unintended consequences for “real” media institutions as well.
And if it’s “no big deal,” why is it being federally regulated, and why isn’t “real” media doing it already? For the record, I actually do fully support the overt labeling of subsidized promotional content on blogs, just as I support the labeling of infomercials on television or of “special inserts” in newspapers and magazines. It’s the FTC’s definition of what constitutes subsidized promotional content on blogs that is flawed—and just as “real” media feels no universal obligation to provide readers with a justification for all its non-subsidized content, bloggers should not have any obligation to defend themselves when no offense is being committed.