Mark has an indepth interview with Mr. Magazine, Samir Husni. I recommend it for those interested in magazines. Since I have spent time over the years discussing magazines with Samir, I’m not surprised that I agree with most everything he says. However, there are a couple of subtle disagreements I have.

First, I disagree with his blanket assertion that “blogging is not journalism.” If he meant to say, “what I do on my blog is not journalism,” I can agree, as I recently said something similar: that I do not consider what I do here journalism, or even Writing, for that matter. However, if what he meant was “no blogging is journalism,” I can categorically disagree as I know many bloggers who practice classic journalism on a blogging platform — Mark Glaser, for example. And I know journalists who blog with the same degree of professionalism and reporting skills on their blogs as they do when reporting or writing using other platforms. A blog is like a blank slate — what goes onto it can be journalism or it can be lunatic ranting. The “blog” platform does not prevent it from being a vessel for classic journalism. Or, at least, that’s what the Pulitzer Committee communicated when they awarded the Times Picayune a 2006 Pulitzer for reporting that was, for many days, distributed via a weblog.

The second point of disagreement — a slight one — regards his stance towards “putting a magazine’s content on the web.” He makes a great point that magazine editors do a good job of pushing their print readers to the web and a lousy job of pushing their web readers to print — and I share his contention that the print and online presence of a magazine should not mirror one another, but be different, complementary experiences. However, I would argue that placing text from a story in a magazine on the magazine’s website is not putting the magazine on the web. Even digital versions of magazines that display the design of the print piece is merely a replica of a magazine — not a magazine.

The “words” from a magazine that appear on a website are not the magazine. It’s like comparing the experience of streaming video on YouTube to watching HD television on a 60 inch plasma screen. Or, it’s like comparing watching a football game on a 60 inch plasma screen to having tickets on the 50-yard line. Same content: different experience. The words from a magazine that appear on the web are, at best, a sampling of the magazine — not the experience of the magazine.

Lastly, the editor from Newsweek who told Samir’s students that the “max” number of words someone will read in an article on the Internet is spewing faux data from an imaginary source. It’s a myth. How do I know? Well, Samir makes that quote roughly 1,659 words into the interview. And I read it — and kept reading to the end, about 1,400 words later. If Mark Glaser had interviewed Samir for a magazine article, do you think the editor would have let it run the 3,000+ words that are included on the website? Heck, maybe I’m the only person who read all the way to the 3,000th word, but I’m sure glad Mark didn’t have to deal with any of the constraints that a magazine would have placed on him.

Unlike Samir, I am not offended when a magazine tells me to go online to read or listen to an entire interview with someone. I think magazines have a higher calling than being repositories of archival material — give me the edited version in the magazine — that’s what great writers and reporters do: find the story in all those words people say. However, I think it’s great when you also provide me the means to read online everything that ended up on the cutting room floor — the full interview. Heck, give it to me in a transcript, in audio or video.

I cringed before pointing to the New York Times story about the files of an entire issue of Business 2.0 getting deleted before being sent to the printer. You see, it’s really bad luck for a magazine publisher to point out something like that and ask, “How the heck could that happen?” We run nightly backups of work in progress and have redundant files stored on and off site. However, as soon as I say, “that couldn’t happen here,” it will happen here. So, I won’t.

(via: TechCrunch)

Paul Conley shares my belief (or, more correctly, I share his) that text within the body of a news article should not be hyperlinked to advertisements. Paul has long been the leading opponent to this practice among the small group of us who are sometime labeled “magazine bloggers” or “b2b media bloggers.” I am 100% agreement with his complaint. Today, he blogs that Ziff Davis (not currently related to ZDNet) has again started to embed ads in news articles. This may seem like a nuanced and esoteric issue, but it’s not hard to understand if you follow the common sense and ethically enlightened belief that in the context of a news story — the edit well — advertisements and sponsorships should be clearly marked as such. If I’m reading a story and I see a word linked, then my expectation as a reader is that the link goes to something editorial directly related to the word or term highlighted. Likewise, if I see something that is marked “adv.,” then I think it goes to something that is advertising. I am not against advertising (obviously) or advertising online. I’m not even opposed to having clearly marked advertising or sponsored content that is interspersed with editorial content. The practice that Paul (and I) oppose is the hidden nature of hyperlinked-text advertising.

This is a slippery slope. The technology of hyperlinking is racing forward and the editorial and advertising usage of the link will follow the technology. For an example of “the future,” visit any article on the New York Times website and double click on any word, whether it is underlined or not. You will be taken to an “encyclopedia entry” for that word. It’s a very cool feature, but only because the Times is smart enough to tread gently on the feature: there are no ads on the results page except for the “powered by Answers.com” icon. But soon, who knows? I am sure an argument can be made for how a link from one page that is editorial content sponsored by advertising to another page that is editorial content sponsored by advertising fits within the parameters of ethically appropriate practices.

Also, what about a news article that clearly states at the beginning of the article that all links in the article are to ads. Would that make it ethical? In my mind, it would make it about as ethical as a blog post that a marketer purchased through one of the “pay to post” services that require the blogger to disclose somewhere that the post was purchased: in other words, it could be morally defendable, but still slimy. As a reader, I’d unsubscribe from the RSS feed of the blog/website and would, whenever possible, use other sources.

Disclosure and transparency are the best measures of ethics. Advertising and sponsorships are good things. But, how those sponsorships are executed and where and how that advertising appears is what make them appropriate — or not.

Later: After Scott (see comments) noted that a user can turn off the text ads, I clicked over to the site and discovered that, yes, if one knows where to go and how to do it, one can opt out of the hypertext linked ads. Again, that’s an ethical feint — like announcing at the top of the article that links go to ads — that may provide a publisher some room for a fuzzy defense of the practice, but at what cost? Certainly, it’s not worth what it must be to signal to your writers and readers when you do this.