Spalpeen

The Independent, Jerome Taylor - First it was models, now bloggers and sex workers add to the return of unions

Press Gazette, Martin Stabe - NUJ may get its first full time blogger tonight
- NUJ freelance branch confirms first blogger member

Jeremy Dear, General Secretary of the NUJ - Through Bleary Eyes

Journalism.co.uk, Laura Oliver - NUJ admits ‘first full-time blogger’

PoynterOnline, Paul Bradshaw - Why One Blogger Joined the NUJ

Freelance UK - NUJ admits its first freelance blogger

Online Journalism Blog, Paul Bradshaw - Over to you, Roy: Why a blogger joined the NUJ

Andrew Keen, via email - “not really. Your work still needs to be edited.”

In response to a question on the NUJ New Media email list. 

Google is clearly eyeballing Wikipedia with Knol. (Disclosure: I work for Mahalo.com - many people have cast Google’s Knol as a direct response to Mahalo)

The key questions that journalists and the NUJ as a whole should be asking here is: will there be any vetting of content? Will writers be paid?

The NUJ always seems to be at least couple of steps behind with everything related to the web. Jeremy Dear wrote today/yesterday that bloggers should be thinking about joining the union. That might have been a relevant statement two or three years ago. And it’s still irrelevant today considering the farce of a process that is “applying to the NUJ”.

An entirely new form of publishing is rapidly being built through companies like Wikia, Squidoo, Digg, Mahalo, etc. Technically, we have 3,000 part time employees at Mahalo on top of the 50 in house guides - all of them are getting paid to write. The numbers at other sites are even bigger. Mahalo’s numbers could be 10-100x bigger in 4 years.

5 years ago, it was unheard of for people to get paid to blog. 6 months ago, it was unheard of for people to get paid to write search pages.

If the NUJ is really serious about its role of defending workers AND new media, it should be completely on top of every single new development where people get paid to write online. They should be reaching out to people and asking them if they need help with dealing with their employee(s). The application process to the NUJ should be as simple as clicking a link.

Read about it here.

The bottom line is: people who are in a position where their unbiased opinion is part of their overall brand should not dabble in advertising. Get someone else to do it, or take yourself out of a direct publishing role and manage other writers. It’s as simple as that. Writers should not be in a position where they have to arrange or be pitched on advertising campaigns. Heck, writers probably shouldn’t even know the people that do sales (the first time I met the sales people at WIN was nearly two years into the job, and I still don’t have their contact information!).

The whole point about impartiality is that you can’t just say that you are impartial. Readers will never implicitly trust you. The only way you can remain impartial is by keeping yourself separate from anything that has money and wants to influence you.