We continue our week's discussion about being paid to blog by delving into the question of disclosure: Whether you are explicitly paid money, paid in services or product, or are simply biased because of your relationship to the vendor or subject, it's not an infrequent occurrence for bloggers to find themselves writing about something where they're quite clearly biased (see yesterday's discussion Quick, are you biased?) and need to let their readers know.

While it's easy to say "yeah, disclose it," there are ways and ways to disclose. Obviously, when you should be disclosing but aren't, it's trouble, as happened with Wal-Mart / Edelman's ham-handed management of the Walmarting Across America weblog (which I wrote about on my own blog: Edelman screws up on Wal-Mart Blog Project). That's an extreme case, however.

But what about a blog that has small print on the bottom of the page that, when you actually zoom in and read it, says something like "This blog is sponsored by General Motors Corporation" or "Note: Canon and Nikon have paid for promotional consideration on this weblog."  If it's not obvious, is it disclosure?

Really, there are two issues here: what should be disclosed, and how it should be disclosed for maximum transparency.

A few days ago, I wrote a review of a Corsair Survivor 8GB USB flash drive over on my popular AskDaveTaylor blog. The product was sent to me -- free -- by the Corsair PR agency. That clearly needed a disclosure, so I introduced the product by saying "when Corsair contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in looking at their 8GB "Survivor" flash drive, I quickly assented". Is that sufficient disclosure that it is clear to even the laziest reader that I reviewed something I hadn't purchased? Another nuance: since most of what I review is sent by the vendor, do I also need to therefore also disclose when I actually buy something and then write about it?  Probably, but what kind of disclaimer does that require, and what does that imply about the complexity of coming up with disclaimers in the first place?

What concerns me is that if we go too far with disclaimers, it becomes very difficult to know where to draw the line, to figure out where you don't have to disclaim what you write. For example, I've been a cinemaphile for as long as I can remember, have watched thousands of movies and read at least fifty different books on film theory and interpretation. Along the way, I have found certain directors who I believe are brilliant (Lean, Hitchcock, Kubrick) and others that I think can't direct their way out of a paper bag (Lynch, Tarantino). Clearly, I'm biased and, heck, you probably don't agree with my bias. So should I disclaim my bias before I write about film, review a movie or even talk about an actor or production?

CLAIMING YOUR DISCLAIMER

The other half of this, as I suggested earlier, is the question of how to disclose your bias or relationship with the company of which you write. Should it be the very first line of the blog entry?  Should it be the last line of the entry, perhaps in italics, or can it even be in a sidebar or the bottom of the page?  Red letters?  Bigger type?

Before you leap to an answer, though, think about this: when you read PC Magazine or Macworld, do they tell you if they bought the products they review or had them sent by the vendors?  Does that matter to you and do you believe that it might well skew the review?  What if you knew that the vendor had sent a 5lb box of gourmet chocolate to the reviewer along with the software package?  Or a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.com?

Journalists often have a "$100 rule", where any gift worth more than $100 cannot be accepted. This means that the travel writer - theoretically - paid for that two week cruise through the Mediterranean, even if the company offered other non-monetary perks and privileges to ensure that the experience was optimal (after all, it's hard to hide a camera crew on a ship).  Is $100 the right mark?  If you are paid less than $100 in cash or services, would you disclose it?  More importantly, should you disclose it?

Let me leave all these questions floating and let's see what your take is on this subject. We're getting the core questions covered... soon we'll talk explicitly about being paid to blog. Really. :-)