I HAVE RETURNED AGAIN
posted by James Reel
A long, long time ago I announced that I’d soon be resuming blogging. Obviously, I was being too optimistic. Since then, I’ve been doing my own job (announcing live from 6 a.m. to noon every weekday), plus half the work of each of two other employees who got laid off at the beginning of summer. I’ll tell you more about what I’m up to behind the scenes later, but for now you’ll just have to take my word that I’ve been too busy to blog.
But I did streamline my life at the beginning of September by giving up my arts-editor position at the Tucson Weekly, whereupon I promptly absconded to Greece and Rome for two and a half weeks. Now I’m back, and settling into a routine, and it looks like I’ll finally be returning to the blogosphere on a regular basis.
I may not post again until next week—I’m trying to catch up on a backlog of CD cataloguing—but for now, I’d like to point you in the direction of Jack Shafer’s denunciation of the Federal Trade Commission’s new disclosure rules for bloggers.
In short, the guidelines require bloggers who review or promote products or services to disclose any connections they may have to the manufacturers or service providers. There have clearly been abuses of celebrity bloggers promoting stuff in return for payment, but really, the FTC is over-reacting. Look: Every classical music magazine—those few that still exist, anyway—review CDs provided free of charge by the record labels or their publicists. Everybody knows this. Nobody worries about it. Negative reviews flow as freely as the positive. And even holier-than-thou newspapers thrive on freebies. They’d quickly go bankrupt if they had to pay for their sportswriters’ and arts critics’ admission to the events they cover.
Just for the record, every CD I’m likely to review in this space (most of the reviews are reprints of items I provide to magazines) came to me gratis directly from a manufacturer or a publicist, or from them via a magazine editor. That’s the only time I’m going to say it. If you want to know how I feel about the FTC’s power grab, read Shafer’s article, and see the graphic representation of my attitude to the FTC below.
