Spalpeen

You may recall the former Sunday Mirror columnist Zoe Griffin, who resigned in March this year after working for The Sunday Mirror under the brand of “youngest, hottest columnist out there”, despite being older than the News of the World’s Dan Wootton, her main rival at the time. According to Journalisted she also contributed to MailOnline, The Mirror and The Sunday Mirror.

It appears as if the very same Zoe Griffin has been surrupticiously touting energy drinks products on her blog, without any form of disclosure.

In a post discussing the topic of a chance encounter with The Wire star Aidan Gillen, Griffin somehow manages to connect his svelte figure with a low calorie energy drink. Or how about this more recent post on a chance encounter with two of the former All Saints singers at a launch of a new hair care products line, which manages to link to the same energy drink again, because “they are made in the same factory”.

I’m speculating here, but it has all the hallmarks of a PayPerPost deal. That latter example might also suggest that Griffin has a personal connection with the Salon that hosted the party.

In a month which has seen the ASA rapping the Express for misrepresenting adverts as editorial, it’s not a great sign that former gossip columnists of national papers potentially think it’s ok to shill products on their blogs.

Props go to @Badjournalism for spotting these posts.

A response to Mediaite’s little piece on David Carr’s New York Times piece on AOL.

I count one link to an AOL blog property on AOL.com right now. One. That goes to ParentDish.com. Besides that there’s a permanent link to Autoblog on the top left sidebar. Every other link goes to an AOL.com news/fashion/celeb property (which I don’t count as a blog property).

AOL.com does drive a lot of traffic to its own properties. But it isn’t the reason sites under the Weblogs, Inc. umbrella (and their sister sites that run on Blogsmith) have been a success. Nor are galleries, which are used by 99% of AOL’s competitor sites. The real point the Mediaite piece hits on here is “what happens when/if AOL turns off dial-up, and it loses half its traffic to AOL.com?” Well, that hasn’t happened yet, and even if it did, it probably wouldn’t change a lot for most of AOL’s smaller spin-off properties.

I don’t know why I’ve written all this about AOL (disclosure: I used to work indirectly for the company at Weblogs, Inc.), other than to say that writing for them on a spin-off site is an amazing experience. Why? Because as a freelance writer at AOL you can work for them for 3+ years and never have to actually meet or talk to or even email someone directly employed by AOL (if you do happen to meet them, they’re usually very nice!).

Blogging for AOL in my mind equals complete editorial independence. In fact, you’re so cut off from “AOL proper” that getting a link to your blog post on AOL.com really isn’t worth the frustration and bureacracy. You get such a small and temporary gain in traffic and readership (and those @aol.com users still haven’t figured out what Caps Lock is for), that you’ll probably end up not bothering. That was certainly the case when I was there between 2005-2007, and judging by the number of AOL blog links on AOL.com, it’s probably still the case.