For the Record

A minor kerfuffle seems to be brewing about disclosure (which is, to us securities lawyers, God) by online citizen journalists about products/services they endorse.  When the topic hits The New York Times you know it's official, and the FTC has also posted regs for public comment governing this "Wild West."  Here's how Ford Motor's "global manager of digital and multimedia communications," Scott Monty, put it:

[Monty:] "Since blogging is relatively new and because there's no editorial oversight, it can seem like the Wild West, absent any guiding principles." ...

The lack of regulation has allowed companies to pay or otherwise compensate bloggers for promotional content, which bloggers have been free to pass off as personal opinion. Neither company nor blogger was held responsible for outlandish and unverifiable claims.

But the "Wild West" days may soon be over. 

This will be really quick, folks, but for the record here's the "Adam Smith, Esq." policy:

• Nobody can buy one word of coverage on this site for any price:  Not for love and not for money.  Hasn't ever happened; never will.  Full stop.
  
  
• If a sponsor purchases an advertisement on the site, they go into the equivalent of the editorially quarantined deep-freeze for the duration of the campaign, plus some suitable "cooling off period" afterwards.
  
  
• Between this site and my management consulting business there is an unyielding and impregnable Chinese Wall.  Firms I might be working with get the same treatment as advertisers:  They go into editorial purgatory for the duration, and then some.
  
  
• I always and everywhere try to disclose relationships and friendships and if you ever wonder about something, ask me point blank
  
  
• The only things of value I've ever received have been the occasional reviewers' copies of newly published books--90% of them unbidden.  After I've read them, if I read them, I donate them to the library.

Told you it would be short.