I’ve been working on a number of grad school projects. I’ve been blogging about them here.
One of those projects involves a video highlighting my father’s expertise as a transit-industry consultant. Here, he talks about building strong client relationships.
I guess I consider myself a blogger, even though I’ve only got 40-some posts here to my credit. So I’ve been half-watching the development of the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines that threaten bloggers with fines if they don’t disclose receiving free products while writing reviews of said products — that’s the gist as I read it, anyway.
Slate curmudgeon Jack Shafer provides his usual high-octane takedown:
The guidelines have to be read to be believed. They are written so broadly that if you blog about a good and service in such a way that the FTC construes as an endorsement, the commission has a predicate to investigate. The only way stay on the FTC’s good side is with a “clearly and conspicuously” posted disclosure of the “sponsors” who provided you with the good or service (or money) to blog about the good or service. As I read the guidelines, the FTC could investigate you if you did disclose but it was not satisfied with the disclosure.
Right. I see the merits of the theory of the FTC’s guidelines, but in practice? Ugh. Shafer concludes:
Because of a pesky thing called the First Amendment, the guidelines don’t apply to news organizations, which receive thousands of free books, CDs, and DVDs each day from media companies hoping for reviews. But if the guidelines don’t apply to established media like the New York Review of Books, which also happens to publish reviews on the Web, why should they apply to Joe Blow’s blog? Regulating bloggers via the FTC while exempting establishment reporters looks like a back-door means of licensing journalists and policing speech.
Posted in Weblogs
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