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LinuxToday Astroturfing Explained
cigarky sent us Paul Ferris' account (fwiw, Paul is a good guy) of the LinuxToday astroturfing that we mentioned a few weeks ago. Much more explanation about how Executive Editor Kevin Reichard was posting numerous comments under numerous aliases on the LT forums. Even more scary is the editorial war regarding linking outside content. My opinion is that LT's only value was the outside content they linked: until Dave and later Paul left, they were the best url for finding comprehensive Linux news. A real eye-opening piece about "Journalism" and Internet.com. (Note: LT and Internet.com are sorta competitors, although I never really cared much. My opinions are probably skewed somehow because of that ;))
Unfortunatly the person who told the author that this happens all the time was extremly correct, and just not on internet sources.
A story to illistrate from what I know. When I worked for a local paper they used to run what was called a "readers choice" award. The idea being that people would vote on what places around town they liked the best. categories included best place to eat, best pizza etc. I had a friend who worked for a regional pizza chain. He told me that he had been directed by the boss, along with several other employees to fill out these forms to be sent in. I , of course, reported what I had heard to the editor of that section of the paper and she said that she would look into it.
When I spoke to her a week later she told me that yes that she had found massive evidence of ballet fraud. Random samplings of ballets with this store on them had turned up the people who had their name on the ballot had not filled them out. She said that she had personally seen over 100 ballots filled out with the same pen and handwriting. I felt vidicated. Then the awards were anounced. The number one spot was that pizza chain! I spoke to the editor and asked how this could be, she told me that it was a marketting decision from above. Basically they bought so much ad revenue they were given that spot.
This just illistrates the porblems that any news repoting agency faces. If you moderate you are going to slant the moderation to the bias of the viewer, what I consider a troll you may consider a witty comment. The first time you remove a post for any reason the news starts to slant, even if the post was trash pure and simple. It is a slippery slope that once started down cannot be stopped.
The same goes for advertising, you may think that they are the worst people in the world but you have to generate ad revenue and therefore accept their ads. Some ad revenue is turned away but once accepted it does flavor the news that it supports.. A final fact about this from my expereinces at the local paper. We where told that out of our 100 million dollar revenue from the previous year 11 million had come from news paper sales, the rest had come from advertising. In the four story building I worked in one third of one floor was for the news department, the rest of the building was for the advertising departments. Journalism has alwasy been subjugated to market forces. It's almost a good sign that online journalism has started to feel these effects themselves. It is a sign that online news is growing up.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
There are only two journalistic sites on the web that charge a fee and make money - The Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports. Both are generally considered to have high journalistic standards. Both avoid publishing press releases. Both make money. This should tell you something.
For me to get out and add a bit to this story. I worked as a freelance writer for internet.com over a period of a few months. I stuck to simple administrivial details and the occasional story about programming. For the most part my articles were not that great but they were of technical nature.
I worked for Kevin directly. I also submitted invoices to him directly as well.
As time went on, communications between Kevin and I diminished slowly. I did not mind because that was during the summer of 2000 and a lot was happening. I wrote it off as he was busy.
Finally, towards the end of last summer, I was beginning to get worried, I had submitted 2 rather large articles which they had in their possession but had done nothing with. It worried me since technically the material was mine until they decided to print it and (for some reason) I feared they were never going to do anything with it.
As time went on, I tried to make contact again and again (a few times I used some choice words I probably should not have). Finally I contacted Kevin's boss about the issue after waiting almost 2 months.
I was fired the next day. Interestingly, I was only ever harsh with Kevin, so I sort of did not understand why I was fired since I had been pretty professional in the email to his boss. Needless to say my confidence dropped thru the floor and I sort of walked away from the whole issue - citing myself as being a luser.
It was shortly after that I was offered work in books with a well respected publisher (whom I still work for every now and again). I began to feel a little better about my writing, but was still confused as to why I had been let go from internet.com.
Around that time I also noticed that the internet.com kludge was getting worse, external sites were not being linked to, forums were obviously being heavily edited/censored - basically it was going down the crapper. Also many internet.com stories were changing from technical to more inflamatory (go figure).
In the end, a little bird told me my firing had been arranged. I no longer fit the content model of internet.com. Most likely my contract would have been discontinued anyway whether I had lobbed a few balls at internet.com or not.
I had asked Kevin not too speak of what happened, I also asked if he would be a reference for me, which he never responded to. I wanted not to have it come up again because my charachter/credibility could possibly come under fire. In retrospect after working on several books and writing for other sites I think it is quite possible that I was not the one with the credibility/professionalism issues.
I still do not speak to Kevin and frankly I do not ever want to see/hear anything about him again unless it concerns his resignation from internet.com and perhaps the field in general.
I would like to say there are still many good editors and writers at internet.com, I do not know how deep seeded this problem is within their management, but I suspect it starts and ends with Kevin.
Thought folks might like that little addition.
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I've worked with the people from Internet.com (I worked at the datacenter they used to host their servers). They are the most obnoxious and overall CRAPPY people you could ever meet. Not only do they think they are the God's of the Internet, they also feel that rules don't apply to them. (This symptom seemed to be company wide, from the pions up to the CTO/VP).
I cannot count the number of times in which they would try to break the rules and claim they weren't informed of these rules. Nothing applied to them. They would walk into the monitoring room (which customers aren't allowed) and act like they lived there, picking up phones and making long distance calls. They were asked EVERYDAY to not do that and when we had site security escort them out, they called one of our VP's and threatened to not buy their $1 million worth of Sun boxes this month.
It was completely ridiculous. They are not "upright business people." They are downright scum. This article only confirms my belief in their ethical practices as a business and as a news agency.