• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 3, 2004

The murky world of blog-related marketing got a bit murkier on Thursday with the launch of NewsBluntly.com, a blog created to influence a highly influential market niche - television news producers - and in the process, find a new, clandestine way of peddling messages from big corporate marketers such as General Motors, Motorola, and Yahoo!, to consumers.

While blogs aimed at TV journalists are not new - Media Bistro's Newser.com already has a strong following - it's the business model of NewsBluntly that, to be, well, blunt about it, is so newsworthy. Unlike most journalist blogs, which depend on advertising - mainly help wanted classified ads aimed at journalists - as a source of revenues, the producers of NewsBluntly claim the site is not designed to generate any revenues directly. Instead, it has been created to "build a community" among TV news producers and to promote an affiliation with their core business, TheNewsMarket.com, a site that corporate marketers pay to distribute video news releases (VNR) and so-called B-roll footage of their products and services in the hopes that TV news producers will incorporate them into their newscasts.

While that is not new, and is itself a broadly accepted practice among journalists and public relations executives alike, the process is generally handled transparently and in a way that TV journalists know they are receiving TV footage from marketers themselves. That process, in fact, is well disclosed on TheNewsMarket.com, but not so on its NewsBluntly.com blog, which offers links to VNRs and B-roll, but does not disclose the fact that marketers are paying to place them into TV newscasts. In fact, the only reference to the TheNewsMarket.com is a small note stating, "NewsBluntly is published for The NewsMarket by Plesser Associates."

The rest of the content on the site looks pretty much like other news industry blogs, featuring stories, comments and critiques about TV news industry developments. The postings, says Shoba Purushothaman, president, CEO and co-founder of TheNewsMarket, are written by legitimate journalists using pseudonyms.

"Frankly I haven't even met them," Purushothaman says. "It was just a choice they had opted for, for all the reasons people work under pseudonyms."

Purushothaman, a former journalist herself, who hosted a blue-chip list of TV journalists and news producers at a launch party Thursday night at a posh night club in Manhattan's Flatiron District, says NewsBluntly is "our attempt to create a little place for working journalists to find out what's going on."

She maintains that the blog is separate from TheNewsMarket's VNR commerce site, though she acknowledges that it does include links to download VNRs and B-roll for corporate marketers that are paying TheNewsMarket to distribute its branded messages. The lead link featured a report by CNET about the popularity of big screen TV's among men this holiday shopping season. Other links included videos about World AIDS Day and the United Nations.

One of the news entries on the site also included a link to a press release about its subject, an award from prestigious journalism school Columbia University.

"I'm generally bothered by the intrusion of this sponsored content into newscasts without being labeled as such," says Edward Wasserman, the Knight Chair in Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University. "There's a tremendous potential for corruption."

Wasserman says the content itself, which included a blog entry about an article written by Wasserman for the Miami Herald about the future of news media, was "stand up stuff." He adds that the fact that the blog entries are written by journalists using pseudonyms is not an ethical conflict, but that the lack of disclosure that the links are to sponsored content potentially is. "That seems to be a minimal concession to transparency," he says. NewsBluntly has also set off red flags among TheNewsMarket's competitors in the VNR business.

"For 18 years, we have worked very diligently to ensure that the entire PR industry and the video and audio providers within it, endorse full and complete disclosure. So a blog that does not clearly disclose its sources, violates so many of the tenants we've worked to create," says Laurence Moskowitz, chairman, president and CEO of Medialink, a leading provider of VNRs for corporate marketers.

"If they have indeed created a blog whose purpose it is to distribute corporate B-roll and it does not identify it as such, that troubles us significantly," he adds. "It's in contravention of the unspoken trust that exists between us and broadcasters. We believe in identifying ourselves as the agent, but also we insist on full disclosure by our clients that they are the ones paying for this. Anything that contravenes that is discomforting to say the least."