Journalists often like to lecture bloggers about the need to “pick up the phone” while writing blog posts. It’s in order to do journalism-y like things, they say, like confirming facts, getting reaction quotes, additional background, that kind of thing. Though journalists can be a little sniffy about it, they have a good point: certainly more and confirmed facts, more perspective, more quotes, more original thought is always a good thing on the webs.
But let’s be honest: for most bloggers – even the serious ones – the online realm is going to be the primary source for most stories, with the blogger himself or herself adding additional perspective, commentary, analysis, and so forth using their own experience and research and writing skills.
Which brings us to Techdirt writer Mike Masnick’s tale. He answers a fair question – can bloggers publish opinions on the Internet without contacting companies that they’re writing about first? – with an affirmative yes.
I recently wrote a short post about something that was apparently happening with YouTube and soon after received an angry email from a PR person at the company first scolding me for not contacting Google PR first and then demanding that I insert some PR babble paragraph that said nothing that addressed the key questions raised in the post in "response." This made no sense to me. If I got something factually wrong, I have no problem having someone point out what was in error, but demanding that I first contact them and then include a meaningless statement is ridiculous.
I’m fully with Mike on this one. The possibility of the Google or YouTube PR department bothering to respond to the average blogger (and you tell me how you would even go about trying to contact a human being at Google about a blog post!) seems astronomically small.
Making demands to add an update to a blog post with PR gibberish sounds like downright cyberbullying to me (did I just make up that term? Sounds like something you’d hear on the local news in 2006 with regard to MySpace*)
And doesn’t Google have the ability to do what any blogger might do when they’re not happy with a blog post? They can write a reaction post themselves. And I’d think they have a none too small amount of online influence to make themselves heard.
* Apparently I did not coin the word cyberbullying.
(this post originally appeared on Technorati)