Gawker Slams Vice Over Journalistic Ethics. Wait. What, Now?

Gawker spent much of this week trying to wipe off the stink of a sponsorship gone horribly awry when it appeared that they allowing a blog post written and paid for by HBO (for TRUE BLOOD) to run without clearly identifying it as a paid post.

To be honest, I had never concerned myself with the journalistic intergrity of Gawker’s writers and their fierce desire to keep a strict division between advertsing and editorial.  It is striking at a time when many of the nations top newspapers and magazines are increasingly blurring that line in what may be a final attempt to stay in business and keep those ad dollars flowing.

Now, Gawker is coming out hard against Vice Magazine for their companion ad agency Virtue.

This is not just some ad sales team for the magazine and the website; they run ad campaigns for outside clients. But the twist is, they get people on the Vice editorial team, “who presumably are a microcosm of clients’ target market,” to help them do it! Vice is outside the whole paradigm of “sellout,” you see…

Now, while I respect Gawker for it’s surpringly high ethics in this matter, I wonder what all the fuss is about.  For starters, I would think that Vice’s writers would have a lot of great marketing ideas and insights into the kinds of people brands like to target.

Is there something so wrong with lending your expertise to a marketing campaign?  Is it some sort of mortal sin for a journalist to moonlight as an advertiser?  Who cares?

Is there a danger that news will be corrupted by too close a relationship between editorial and advertising?  Sure, but with the range of news sources out there I’m not worried about that.

Instead, I think the whole Virtue/Vice idea is kind of clever and Gawker is jealous that Vice continues to grow in many realms why Gawker remains a successful if somewhat creaky media blog.

In a World of Endless Possibility…Why Pauley Shore?

I understand the need for content producers and distributors to do whatever it takes to grab eyeballs.  It’s a crowded, noisy marketplace and the web certainly rewards pushing the boundaries but if “professional” content producers and distributors really want to stand out they need to do a little better than RipeTV’s latest offering… Pauley Shore reporting in all earnestness on the LDS polygamists in Texas.

Come on! If you’re really going to invest money in joining the thousands already beating this story into submission at least bring something substantial to the table.  Why would anyone waste time in their life finding out what Pauley Shore’s unique take is on this situation?

This whole thing just supports my feeling that simply producing content that would never make it out of day one on TV is not going to be a path to success on the web.  As an example of how it should be done take a look at what ViceTV has been doing with their truly down-n-dirty travel show.

(via NewTeeVee)

Vice Does it Right

While there are tons of sites out there providing video on the web VBS.tv, the Vice Magazine-produced website, is one of the best.

A case in point is this new entry from their rough-and-tumble  travel series, this time focusing on the rarely seen North Korea.

Not only does the VBS travel series feel completely authentic but it really takes viewers to places they’re just not gonna see on the Travel Channel.  While I’m sure it can’t be super-cheap to produce shows like this, the value of a well-made series, even with just a few episodes, far trumps the value of hundreds of mediocre vids.