These are the Web’s Woodstock days. From small start-ups to corporate behemoths, the name of the game is to bed as many partners as possible.Online publishers have finally realized that they can’t just put up some wickedly cool content and expect the world to beat a path to their Web sites. Without distribution, you’re dead. Which is why companies are hopping into bed with one another faster than you can say “Powered by ATT (T) WorldNet.” Check out a random sampling of recent partnership deals: Lycos (LCOS) with Information Please; MindSpring with CNN Interactive, CNET (CNET) and Playboy Online; Excite (ATHM) with Music Boulevard and SportsLine USA; and Yahoo (YHOO) with Bluefly, among many others.

Build a virtual love shack with a major business player and you can fatten your bank account and boost your stock price. But that kind of partnership also raises sticky questions of editorial integrity. It’s not hard to find conflicts of interest.

Consider, for example, Microsoft (MSFT)’s new personal finance site, MoneyCentral. When the site launched on Oct. 14, Microsoft handed over a large chunk of editorial real estate to Merrill Lynch (MER), getting an unspecified wad of cash in return. “That’s one of the reasons financial institutions are excited about it, because their content modules are integrated into the page,” says Amanda Young, product manager for MoneyCentral. “We’re providing a unique opportunity to go beyond buttons and banners.”

The trouble is, only a discerning user can tell which is paid content and which is not.

“There’s a fundamental difference between information provided to get at the truth and information provided to persuade someone to do something,” says Bill Doyle, director of money and technology strategies at Forrester Research (FORR). “Journalists prefer the former, and marketers the latter. Consumers have understood that fundamental distinction in newspapers and magazines, but that Chinese wall is being perforated on the Web.”

Microsoft, which still hopes to attract four more advertising partners to the site, is hardly the only company to hawk financial content slots to the highest bidders. Almost every search engine does it. So does America Online (dossier), which raked in $75 million last summer to spotlight three companies in its Brokerage Center. The deals eventually could come back to haunt them.

“In the end, it won’t serve Microsoft well because the quality of the user experience will suffer,” Doyle says. “They’ve ceded control of their content to an advertiser.”

Consider the current mating dance between Wired Digital and Charles Schwab. According to sources at Wired News, the two companies have discussed creation of a cobranded Web page, sponsored by Schwab, with business headlines, story summaries and stock prices provided by Wired Digital. As part of the deal, Wired News would beef up its Internet financial coverage by hiring two full-time contract reporters, to be paid out of the proceeds from the deal.

That provision — which would essentially require that Schwab pick up the salaries of reporters covering the Internet business beat — raised a few eyebrows in the Wired Digital newsroom. An editor who broached the subject at a staff meeting was told the discussions were still preliminary.

Schwab won’t comment on “potential alliances,” but Wired spokesman Andrew de Vries says “the deal is still on the table,” unaffected by the October purchase of Wired Digital by Lycos. De Vries waves off concerns about a potential conflict of interest: “It’s not an issue because of the strong divisions between our marketing and editorial staffs,” he says. “We make it very clear to our partners that they have no influence over editorial, and we make it very clear to the user what is editorial and what is advertising.”

Maybe so, but arrangements like this give journalists the willies. They smack of conflicts of interest.

Reporters at Internet news outlets shouldn’t have to meet a higher standard than their brethren at old-media outlets. But Web news executives are so wrapped up in the business of driving eyeballs and watching the bottom line that they sometimes pay insufficient heed to one fundamental truth of journalism: Credibility is our only currency.

Reporters like to think of themselves as independent-minded SOBs. But they can also be careerists, uninterested in rocking the boat. It’s just possible they’d pull some punches to avoid irritating a business partner. If that happened, it would make us all a little poorer, less trusting and less informed.

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When partnering with advertisers, content sites need to be careful to avoid conflicts of interest

This column appeared in the Dec. 31, 1998, issue of The Industry Standard. Here’s the version on the Industry Standard site.

By J.D. Lasica

These are the Web’s Woodstock days. From small startups to corporate behemoths, the name of the game is to bed as many partners as possible.

It’s finally dawned on online publishers that they can’t just put up some wickedly cool content and expect the world to beat a path to their Web sites. Without distribution, you’re dead. Which is why companies are hopping into bed with one another faster than you can say Powered by AT&T WorldNet. Check out the roll call of recent partnership deals: Lycos with Barnes & Noble. Mindspring with CNN Interactive and CNet. Excite with Music Boulevard and SportsLine USA. Yahoo with everyone.

But what happens to your editorial credibility when you build a virtual love shack with a major business player?

Consider, for example, Microsoft’s MoneyCentral personal finance site, which launched Oct. 14. Microsoft handed over a large chunk of editorial real estate to Merrill Lynch for an undisclosed wad of cash. “That’s one of the reasons financial institutions are excited about it, because their content modules are integrated into the page,” says Amanda Young, product manager for MoneyCentral. “We’re providing a unique opportunity to go beyond buttons and banners.”

The trouble is, only a discerning user can tell which is paid content and which is not. (Sample article: “Inside Trader — Place orders to buy Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch. There’s value in the brokers.”)

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The Online News Association is just what journalism needs — if it opens its doors to rank-and-file journalists

This news analysis appeared Dec. 16, 1998, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

The formation of an Online News Association, devoted to tacking thorny issues of ethics, credibility and credentials faced by Web journalists, fills a vast gap in the online news landscape.

What remains to be seen is whether they can translate that praiseworthy goal into a broad-based grassroots effort that includes not just senior executives but rank-and-file online journalists.

Some two dozen senior managers from major Web news sites met in Chicago last week and agreed to organize a nonprofit group “open to people interested in practicing serious journalism on the Web,” spokesman Rick Jaroslovsky said.

Jaroslovsky, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, said the “eccentric” list of attendees was based on “who I knew and whose e-mail addresses I had in my address book.” Among those in attendance were heavy hitters from the New York Times on the Web, Washingtonpost.com, MSNBC, Time Daily, San Jose Mercury News’ Mercury Center, ABCNews.com, National Public Radio, CNet’s news.com, CBS.MarketWatch.com and USAToday.com. Invited, but unable to attend, were staffers from Slate, Salon and ZDNet.

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The Internet Content Coalition drafts a set of guidelines to separate advertising from content

This column appeared Dec. 16, 1998, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Pick up a print magazine or newspaper and the rules are pretty simple: Ads over here, editorial over here. Sometimes the lines blur, but most often not.

On the Web, it gets murkier. Ads can appear anywhere on a Web page — sometimes smack in the middle of editorial content. Links? Well, there are links, and there are paid links. Buttons may transport you to a related story, or to a merchant. Advertising dollars may skew search engine results. Ads can be targeted to a specific story page, or to a particular user.

Rules of the road? It’s pretty much a crapshoot.

Enter the Internet Content Coalition. The nonprofit trade association, which has been waging the good fight to keep the Net self-regulated, includes such heavy hitters as the New York Times, Time Inc., MSNBC, ZDNet, CNet, Sony, Adobe, CBS Online, Warner Brothers Online and Playboy.

“All of us are concerned about how content is being perceived on the Web,” says ICC co-chair Christopher Barr, editor in chief of CNet, who’s heading up the group’s effort to draft a set of guidelines for online advertising. “We need to make clear to the user what’s being paid for and what’s not.”

Barr’s committee has hammered out a six-page draft that addresses a raft of thorny issues. The draft somewhat grandly calls on editorial-based companies and groups like the ICC “to lead the Internet industry in its development of an ethical conscience.”

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Online news publications should take advantage of personalization’s promise

This column appeared in the December 1998 issue of The American Journalism Review.

By J.D. Lasica

Should online news publications personalize their content?

To date, they’ve shown a remarkable indifference to one of the fundamental hallmarks of new media. While mass media like newspapers, magazine and TV newscasts bring the same information to large numbers of news consumers, the Internet makes it possible for news transactions to be micro-targeted to individuals.

Since 1996, Web portal sites such as My Yahoo, My Excite and My Netscape have grown in popularity, with users able to select favorite news topics, stocks, TV listings, sports teams, horoscopes, and other interests, plus handy reminders of friends’ birthdays or relatives’ anniversaries. Millions of people now use these “personalized pages,” often as their starting point for surfing the Web each day.

So why the resistance by online newspapers? Old media traditions, in part. “Publishers are used to thinking within the box,” says Vin Crosbie, a new media consultant in Greenwich, Conn. “Editors put up pages and force readers to drill down to find what they want. They feel threatened now that they’re losing their gatekeeper role.”

There’s also confusion about what personalization really entails. I see three major trends emerging:

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