A German magazine has accused mega-publisher Ubisoft of denying it a review copy of Assassin’s Creed II because the mag couldn’t guarantee a positive review.

On the cover of the latest issue of Computer Bild Spiele, a headline reads:

SCANDAL! PUBLISHER WANTED US TO GUARANTEE A SCORE OF ‘SEHR GUT’ ['VERY GOOD']

Sadly, this doesn’t necessarily surprise me. Tomb Raider publisher Eidos has already openly admitted that it requests favorable scores, so we know these dubious dealings occur within the industry. That never stops it being hella depressing, so good on Computer Bild Spiele for sticking by its guns. In the online preview of its current issue, the publication states:

“Our reviews are tough, but fair. We will not give up our independent scores for the sake of a timely review. This holds true for Assassin’s Creed 2. The publisher asked us to guarantee the score ’sehr gut’, otherwise we would not receive a review copy, thus we will publish our review in next month’s issue.”

A bit of a shame, especially as Assassin’s Creed II will probably end up a perfectly decent game in its own right.

[We Are The Internetz, via Destructoid]

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Right from the top I have to own up to the fact that part of the post headline is a direct rip from Robert X Cringely’ post the other day about what has to be the scummiest practice I have seen yet when it comes to blogging.

Blogger’s are always getting the short end of the stick when it comes to the credibility game and the stuff we write about but companies like Demand Media are a blight on the profession.

Who is Demand Media you might ask and what is it that they are doing that is so bad?

Well man behind the company is none other than former eUniverse/Intermix CEO Richard Rosenblatt. Intermix besides being being famous as the company that owned Myspace before it was sold to Murdoch’s News Corp is also famous for having to pay $7.5 million in fines for distributing spyware.

However what Rosenblatt, through his new company, is up to these days could be consider equally scummy. The company is in effect nothing more than a factory that spits out 4,000 articles and videos each and everyday. The content is based entirely on ideas that are the results of a computer algorithm that analyzes the keyword frequency from search engines and the ad revenue that each of those keywords would return.

Those keywords are manipulated into carefully massaged headlines by two people at a cost of 8 cents per headline. Those headlines are then sent out to the company’s raft of freelance writers who then pull together a couple of hundred words around that headline which then nets them $20 per post. These posts are then distributed out through Demand Media’s pipeline of properties or customers.

As Cringely says in his post:

If Demand Media’s methods become the way most Web sites generate content (and ad revenue), professional writers will effectively disappear from the Net. It will be just like when that meteor hit the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and leaving nothing but rodents.

But when publications are unable or unwilling to pay professionals to write stories or generate videos, we’ll end up with two kinds of content: the dreck that Demand Media is producing, or higher-quality content that serves the aims of the people who can afford to pay for it — corporations, powerful individuals, governments, and so on. So it’s either amateur hour or propaganda. Take your pick — not a very pleasant choice.

Like I said … scummy.

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I really don’t envy journalists in today’s tumultuous world of changing media boundaries. One minute they are expected to behave as journalists have have for decades and the next they are have to navigate the new world of Twitter and Facebook – often without any “established” guidelines.

This has resulted in many news organizations to finally face facts – social media isn’t going anywhere so we had better figure out how to finally use in a way that is on one hand ready for the future but still tries to maintain journalistic ethics. Sure it is one thing to be willing to jump in with both feet and harness the power of social media and all it can add to journalism, the trick is how to do it without impugning the integrity of the organization, the reporters, photographers and editors.

To do this news organizations like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Associated Press, Roanoke Times along with many others have been trying to hammer out a code of ethics guidelines that they can live with when it comes to dealing with social media.

Mary Hartney, director of audience engagement at the Baltimore Sun, says reporters, editors, managers and others will help shape the new guidelines. "The technology is changing, so I hope the ethics policy is a living document," says Hartney, who estimates about half the Sun’s newsroom actively uses social networks. "All of this stuff is changing very rapidly. So, anything you write down in an ethics policy or as a best practice is liable to change next week."

On social networks, you should identify yourself as a journalist, tell recipients if you’re using social networks in a professional capacity and remain mindful that people will regard you as a representative of your newsroom, says Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute.

"For journalists, transparency is one of the most important values," she says. "That doesn’t mean you don’t act as an individual, but there should be a caution gate if there’s anything that might embarrass your newsroom."

Source: American Journalism Review :: The Limits of Control

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When I was growing up hard work was the accepted norm. From the age of eleven I have been working with by first experience of hard work being that of working on a dairy farm every summer and much of the winter on the weekends. Slugging bales of hay that could weigh more than I did at the time was hard work. Cleaning out calf pens in the spring from a winter of them being in a 10×10 pen was hard work.

As I got older my work history was one of delivering furniture, managing warehouses and hot tar roofing. That was hard work and much of my generation believed the same as I did – you got ahead in life by working hard. That was our ethos that we were raised with. It was the same with our parents and their parents. Working hard got you the good things in life and was something to be proud of.

Even the early days of the computerized workspace was built around hard work. We didn’t have the advantage of mass produced software products with much of what we used the machines for we had to program into them. The paperless office ended up being nothing more than a pipedream as we struggled to come to terms with how our work was changing.

The fact is that as the information age has become the driving force of our world our ideas of what hard work is has changed. Whether the change is for the better or not is open to debate but the fact is that the hard work ethic of even my generation is disappearing. In its place we are finding ourselves dealing more and more with having to manage our distractions. As Mike Elgan wrote a couple of days ago at IT Management

Distractions mask the toll they take on productivity. Everyone finishes up their work days exhausted, but how much of that exhaustion is from real work, how much from the mental effort of fighting off distractions and how much from the indulgence of distractions?

Pundits like me are constantly talking about Facebook, Twitter, blogs and humor sites, not to mention old standbys like e-mail and IM. One gets the impression that we should be "following" these things all day long, and many do. So when does the work get done? When do entrepreneurs start and manage their businesses? When do writers write that novel? When to IT professionals keep the trains running on time? When does anyone do anything?

The need for "attention," rather than "hard work," as the centerpiece of the new work ethic has arisen along with the rise of distractions carried on the wings of Internet protocol. In one generation, we’ve gone from a total separation of "work" from "non-work" to one in which both work and play are always sitting right in front of us.

I know from my experience as a blogger writing about this new age of distraction that it is all around us.It is also getting worse with each day that goes by and more people become sucked into the black vortex of being a part of the cool web. From Twitter to Facebook and every social media service in between it is all about being a part of some ever growing conversation. Where once we may only have had to deal with the distractions of things like email and instant messaging we are faced with a deluge of never ending messages. Some are important and others are just the nattering of a 1,000 monkeys used to fill up every nanosecond of our attention.

In some ways I’m pretty lucky in that being a blogger much of these distractions are an integral part of my work but I’ve never stopped wondering as I have seen tweets go by and links posted on FriendFeed – when are people getting any actual work done. It doesn’t matter what social media service you look at there are always people talking.

I’ve also noticed this change of work ethic among the newer generations – especially in the tech sector.For this generation it is all about managing distractions and the expectation that everything will come to them as long as they are a part of the conversation. No more is it about hard work as it is as much about making your presence known everywhere possible. sure a lot will say that they put in long hours of working but long hours doesn’t always equate to hard work – especially in this day and age of distractions.

No related posts.

Just to make sure we have the parameters of this discussion straightened out right from the beginning there are two aspect to this whole social media rigmarole. The first aspect is the actual online world that is social media. It is about interaction with others using a wide ranging set of tools and services. That is not what this post is about.

The second aspect is the business of social media. From the promotion of services and software through to the funding of social media type start-ups this is a multi-million dollar business. Hell it could be a multi-billion dollar business if you fall for the paper valuation of stuff like Facebook. At its core though this business of social media is a relatively small group of very rich and/or powerful people.

Part of this inner circle are a number of equally powerful bloggers who have done very nicely for themselves off of social media – the online environment. While their blog properties carry an immense amount of weight both in the environment; and the business side, it is the names of the people involved with those blogs that are the real cash.

The problem is that this real A-List of social media power brokers is really no different that the old boys network that surrounds old media; or even old business. Even though the idea of blogging is about openness, transparency and disclosure this new old boy’s network practices something much different.

A perfect case in point is the news surrounding Circle of Moms. On December 4th two post written by authors that weren’t really associated by the respective blogs wrote about the amazing numbers that Circle of Moms was getting. Now Circle of Moms originated as a Facebook application but in October launched a parenting website presumably built around the same concept as the Facebook app.

TechCrunch, one of the two sites referenced, brought Nick Gonzalez out of blogging semi-retirement to pitch the news about this wondrous event. The other blog to post about this was Mashable who had Jennifer Van Grove; a Social Media Strategist, write up their version of this ground breaking news.

And what was the news you might ask?

Well apparently since launching in October this mommy site had amazingly enough acquired 850,000+ members. The interesting thing is that this number is pretty close to the number of installed Circle of Moms widget on Facebook.

Now I am going through all this because what comes next is important and knowing some background will be helpful; I believe, in you being able to see what is happening.

Interesting enough on searching through Techmeme on the the day that these posts went live shows nothing as far as buzz happening. I looked  through every hour after and it was until 3:50 AM EST that anything showed up. However it was enough to catch the eye of the blogger behind The Drama 2.0 Show who with some journalistic chops that old media would be proud of did some digging and fact checking on this news.

Now this is where this story starts to get really interesting so hang in there. In the case of TechCrunch and Nick Gonzalez there is some interesting undisclosed connections between Mr. Arrington, Gonzalez and the people behind Circle of Moms. It turns out that Nick Gonzalez works for a company called Social Media which bills itself as a social advertising network that sells ads for widget and application developers.

It also turns out that Social Media’s CEO one Seth Goldstein is friends with the founder of Circle of Moms – Ephram Luft. As well Naval Ravikant as investor in Social Media is an investor in Circle of Moms.

So what is the take away from this simple set of facts?

Nick Gonzalez is an employee of Social Media for which he is probably getting a nice paycheck. Social Media his employer pays him as a result of money invested in them by the same person with interests in Circle of Moms. Now tie this in with the fact that Ravikant, Goldstein and Luft are listed as friends of Michael Arrignton on Facebook which as The Dramma 2.0 Show blog shows Mr. Arrington has a personal connection with all the people involved.

Does any of this matter?

It wouldn’t matter one bit if Arrington through his ownership of TechCrunch and association with the involved parties has publicly declared his conflicts of interest in this. After all isn’t that the most basic tenet of this new media – disclosure and transparency. Well we didn’t see any of that here and this isn’t the first time that questions have been raised about this type of thing with TechCrunch.

Now what about the other shoe – how about dropping it now?

This one isn’t as complex a circle as with TechCrunch but as The Drama 2.0 Show blog found out Mashable isn’t without some ethical questions that need to be asked.

For example the writer of the wondrous news as it appeared on Mashable is one Jennifer Van Grove who as she says on her own site – a community and social media consultant (a cutsey phrase for marketer). So it is her business to write posts like this and wouldn’t you know it she’s listed as a friend of Luft on Facebook.

However one has to point out as well that Pete Cashmore; like Mr. Arrington, is listed as a friend of both Luft and Ravikant as well on Facebook.

As with TechCrunch this involvement by Mashable’s owner Pete Cashmore and new writer Jennifer Van Grove with people surrounding Circle of Moms is something that was never disclosed by anyone involved.

Perhaps this is all just a hinky coincidence?

Sure and I’ve got a bridge you might be interested in. While I’m not going to get my head sized for a tin foil hat by any means one has to really wonder what is being gained by two puff pieces about a website with some highly questionable numbers being bandied about. As many of the commenters on the TechCrunch post pointed out – the numbers don’t make sense.

For me though the more important point to possibly be made here is how the business of social media is potentially being manipulated. Sure Facebook is all about networking and increasing your number of friends. What it shouldn’t be is a meeting ground of the social media power set so that they can create possible false impressions of success or failure because behind all this some-one’s money is being screwed with.

Not to mention that the very people we want to believe in this new media – our readers – won’t appreciate being played like this. Which means we pay the price and the whole basis of what the social media environment is based on is screwed.

But hey – the rich get richer, the powerful get their ego’s fed and the new old boy’s network will continue to grow.

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Should bloggers cover companies they invest in?

The majority of bloggers like myself don’t make enough money to contemplate investing in many companies, but for those who do, the conflict of interest has to be evaluated. While it seems obvious that no one would ever invest in a company they didn’t like or believe would succeed, what about continuing coverage? If a company starts failing, can an investor really cover that objectively? Can an investor really take the same hard look at a company as someone who has nothing to gain whether a company succeeds or fails?

Should bloggers continue blogging once they join boards, take day-job positions with a company, or start/buy a company?

Any type of employment can be just as much a conflict as investing. Board positions and ownership even more so. How can a blogger cover any other company competing in the same space as the company he or she is employed by/directs/advises/runs? What about fellow authors in multi-author blogs? Human nature would assume that friends would want to protect each other’s interests; enemies destroy them. Can one blogger’s interests impact an entire blog?

Should bloggers make friends with people from the companies they cover?

Friendship is probably the toughest conflict of interest. While it doesn’t involve money, it’s a lot harder to cover something objectively knowing that your friend’s feelings or bank account could be harmed based on something you write. Is it possible to work around it? To separate business from friendship? Can you go out to dinner with someone one day and report a problem with the company the next?

Bloggers are always quick to point out ethical transgressions of others, but the fact is that many times, we have issues of our own. Everything from accepting swag to offering advice to investing in a company you’ve covered have ramifications. And perhaps we should look out of our navels into a mirror before we accuse others of conflicts of interest.

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