Editorial Ethics: Are We Rearranging Deck Chairs on The Titanic

The editorial ethics debate -- on these pages and elsewhere -- has provoked much soul searching, heated opinion, agreement and denial. But has it only been a futile effort to understand and correct an outdated and fading system?

The debate centers on the Editor -- purported keeper of all that is good and true -- being seduced/pressured by evil commercial forces, embodied in the position of the publisher. See Ralph Grabowski's "D**m Magazine S**k-ups" for an explanation of these roles.

But if I may boil it down to its essential conclusion, the editor/publisher system as discussed is broken. If the editor has a publisher for a boss, all the high minded ideals face the root of all evil. And the root of all evil will win.

Traditional publishing firms still cling to the church/state parallel as an example of how commercial interests don't bias editorial integrity. This parallel has always bothered me. First of all, who is the church and who is state? And if editors were "state," in order for the parallel to work, the pope would have a head of state as a boss.

But how many magazines in our industry are still being published using the traditional editor/publisher model? Most of them have gone away, leaving only two (Cadalyst and Desktop Engineering). As we look at the material that is being published now, most of it is online and quite a bit of that is not published in the traditional sense. Look at all the blogs -- individuals are self publishing. If they have any ads at all, they are Google ads, and Google (whose internal slogan is "don't be evil") exerts no influence at all over content.

The freedom to publish freely is changing everything and, in the process, may just sink the old model.

That's not to say the new emerging models don't have issues. For example, online ad-supported publishing companies often have a single person who acts as both editor and publisher. Now conflict of interest can reside in a single body.

Perhaps it is time to leave the old model behind and examine issues in the new media?

Comments

[rachael Dalton-Taggart]

Roopinder
Great article. Great subject and something that occupies me a lot in my various roles. If we are looking at the 'new media' there are already problems there.

For example, every few months my email inbox fills up with multiple copies of 'Cafe' news - MCADcafe, AECcafe etc). I go through a slow process of unsubscribing them and notice, especially last week, that the newsletter is being sent to a number of emails that I have definitely NOT signed up (read: not opted in). As I have multiple emails that end up in my in-box, i can start to see when an email has been scraped and then used.

Do I blame Dave for doing this? Not really. Any email on a press release is probably regarded as fresh meat. But I do object when I see marketing pieces from MCADcafe claiming to send out a newsletter to 70,000-plus recipients....at least 10 of which are emails that come to me and of which only 2 are opted in!

So why am I revealing this? Because it comes down to ethics. With the old print magazine model, there was a wide and strong acceptance for BPA audits and similar. Even while these could be somewhat skewed by a savvy publisher, they took measures to minimize any misrepresentation of data. BPA can do little or nothing, in my opinion, to thoroughly measure and monitor web traffic, opt-in emails etc that a web site receives. Advertisers are now very subject to the whims and exaggerations of the publishers and the only balance is the publisher's ethics.

And don't get me wrong - I don't intend to pick on Dave specifically. His sites are just a current example of what can be wrong in the 'new media', and is a reflection of the general publishing industry (yourself not included BTW). Without some strong auditing tools, advertisers are a potential victim of publishers who may not be entirely ethical. I think advertisers should push for better monitoring and auditing and not simply trust that the right thing might occur.