Updates on CMO, Ethics

An update (admittedly belated) on the now-defunct CMO magazine, which was based in Framingham:

Paul Conley reported last month that former CMO editor-in-chief Rob O'Regan has a blog called Magnosticism, where he blogs mainly about marketing and advertising. But the blog also houses some of the content from CMO. Since CMO's closing, the articles are is no longer available from CXO Media, but the company has given O'Regan permission to reproduce them on his blog.

You may remember that CMO won ASBPE's Magazine of the Year award in its first year in existence.

In the same post, Conley notes that Ryan Block, editor in chief of the blogazine Engadget, has posted an open letter to the industry about IntelliTXT-style pop-up ads that appear on keywords on some web sites' stories.

You can read our previous posts on the subject of IntelliTXT here.

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Posted by Martha Spizziri on Friday, September 28, 2007 @ 1:44 PM
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Northeast Region Awards Banquets Set for July

Again this year, the Northeast Region of the American Society of Business Publication Editors is pleased to announce two awards ceremonies to honor regional winners of the 2007 Azbee awards.

Depending on your location and preference, this year you may attend a Boston-area event on the evening of July 18 or a midtown New York City event the following week.

In either case, you’ll be treated to a great guest speaker, a terrific awards program, and a chance to connect with your colleagues in the region.

DETAILS: BOSTON AREA

GUEST SPEAKER: Award-winning journalist and public radio veteran John Carroll.

Through his newest venture, John Carroll’s Take, which airs Thursdays at 6:35 a.m. and 8:35 a.m. during WGBH 89.7 FM’s broadcast of Morning Edition and at 5:45 p.m. during WGBH 89.7’s broadcast of All Things Considered, Carroll gives his perspective on today’s hottest topics in news, media, technology, and more. <

Carroll currently serves as a professor of mass communications at Boston University and a panelist for "Beat the Press," a weekly discussion on media on WGBH's Greater Boston public affairs TV program.

DATE: Wednesday, July 18, 2007

TIME:
6:00 p.m.: Social hour/cocktails
7:00 p.m. Dinner, followed by speaker and awards.
COST:

SUPER EARLY BIRD DISCOUNT— RESERVE AND PAY BY TUESDAY, JUNE 12
ASBPE members: $50 per person
Nonmembers: $55 per person
Tables of 8: $390
REGULAR PRICE — RESERVE AND PAY AFTER JUNE 12
ASBPE members: $60 per person
Nonmembers: $65 per person
Tables of 8: $450
Banquet tickets may be paid for by check or by Visa, Mastercard, or American Express.

LOCATION:
Papa Razzi
16 Washington St.
Wellesley, MA
Located just of I-95 (state Route 128) near Mass. Turnpike (I-90).
Also a 10-minute walk from public transit Green Line.
IMPORTANT: There is ample parking at Papa Razzi but it will not be obvious unless you review the detailed parking information (428K PDF).
NEED MORE REASONS TO COME?

Check out what’s happening this summer in Boston.(3.3M PDF)
And consider taking in a Red Sox game at Fenway Park -- they play at home all week.

PLEASE RSVP NO LATER THAN MONDAY, JULY 9 to Alan Earls at alan.earls@comcast.net or (508) 528-6930, or to Martha Spizziri at mspizziri@rcn.com or (617) 628-5466.

DETAILS: NEW YORK CITY

The New York event will be held July 26. Details are on the New York chapter page.

5/30/07 update: Note the change above: The Super Early Bird discount has been extended through Tuesday, June 12.

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Posted by Martha Spizziri on Friday, May 25, 2007 @ 1:56 PM
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Ziff Davis, eWeek, Again Subject of Ethics Controversy

The same day I posted about a recent Folio: profile of Ziff Davis Media, B2B publishing consultant Paul Conley published a blog post titled "Ziff Davis crosses the ethics line again."

Conley's post centers around Ziff Davis' decision to once again use Vibrant Media's IntelliTXT in-context ads on some of its sites, after pulling them from eWeek earlier this year. (See earlier post on this blog, "eWeek/IntelliTXT Flap," and two earlier posts on Paul Conley's blog, "eWeek crosses an ethical line" and " eWeek retreats in ads-within-edit scandal" for background.) The ads are back in eWeek and also appear on the company's CIO Insights web site.

Folio: published a story about the controversy on May 3. The article quotes Ziff Davis editorial director and senior VP Michael Vizard as saying "The IntelliTXT ads are clearly labeled as advertisements in compliance with existing ASME and ASBPE guidelines as we understand them. Should these officially recognized bodies adopt specific policies related to IntelliTXT ads, we would welcome that clarification and would also be inclined to comply with those guidelines."

ASBPE's ethics guidelines do, in fact, state that links within editorial content should be under editorial control. But in response to Vizard's statement, the ASBPE ethics committee has attempted to clarify the issue. The last sentence of the relevant portion of our Code of Preferred Editorial Practices, Section VII, Paragraph D, previously read:
Contextual links within editorial content should not be sold, and generally should not link to a vendor’s Web site, unless it is pertinent to the editorial content or helpful to the reader.
It now reads:
Contextual links within editorial content should not be sold. If an editor allows a link, it generally should not link to a vendor’s Web site, unless it is pertinent to the editorial content or helpful to the reader.
ASBPE national president Roy Harris relayed this change to Folio: and it was posted as an addendum to the May 3 article. As Roy says in an accompanying statement to Folio:, "We feel the code offers a clear guideline: Editors, not publishers or ad-sales folks, should make the final decisions on ALL uses of links within edit copy. Also, ad links within editorial text should NOT be sold under any condition."

A short news item about the whole matter will soon be issued by ASBPE national and posted on the ASBPE web site. I'll post an update when it appears. In the meantime, here are other posts on the topic:

From ASBPE ethics committee member Jeff Seglin:
 From Paul Conley's blog:
From custom publisher Rex Hammock's blog:
For a contrarian view, see this post on Eric Shanfelt's personal blog:
(Shanfelt is a former senior VP of emedia at Penton Media Inc.)

Update, 5/16/07: Also see "ASBPE Speaks Out on Hypertext Link Issue," on the news section of ASBPE's web site.

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Posted by Martha Spizziri on Monday, May 07, 2007 @ 11:04 AM
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Robert Krakoff, Former Reed Executive, Dies

Via ExCahnNews:

Robert Krakoff, the Nielsen Business Media president and CEO who spent 23 years at Reed Elsevier, the parent company of Boston-area company Reed Business Information, died at his home in Boston on Friday. Krakoff also spent time as he had been the chairman and CEO of Cleveland-based Advanstar Inc.

Here are reports from:
Addendum, 2/27/07: B2B blogger David Shaw has published a thoughtful remembrance of Bob Krakoff.

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Posted by Martha Spizziri on Monday, March 26, 2007 @ 11:29 AM
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eWeek/IntelliTXT Flap

In case you missed it: Woburn-based Ziff Davis publication eWeek has been the subject of some Internet controversy for its use of IntelliTXT contextual ads, which are hotlinked from within the text of editorial content. The IntelliTXT service was developed by the company Vibrant Media.

Rather than repeat what's already been said, I'll direct you to some of what's been written about it:

One thing I will repeat that's mentioned in Paul Conley's post: ASBPE's ethics guidelines state

The editorial department should control all editorial content on a publication’s digital publication, including Web site, blogs, e-newsletters, digital magazines, and others. Standards such as accuracy, attribution, fairness, and balance applying to a publication’s printed editorial material also apply to a publication’s Internet or digital presence.

Care should be used online, as with printed material, to avoid placement of advertisements in or near editorial content in a way that could compromise editorial integrity or confuse the reader.


And I do have a few comments about this 2004 post from John Battelle's Searchblog, which Matt McAlister's post above also links to: "IntelliTXT: Your Advertising Peanut Butter Is In My Editorial Chocolate..." Although the piece is almost three years old, Battelle makes an interesting devil's-advocate argument that contextual ads within articles might not be so bad after all. Battelle's reasoning, in brief:

... [M]agazines that are essentially catalog magazines ('magalogs'), or most of the Seven Sisters (Glamour, Vogue, etc) ... pretty much exist to move product, and they don't pretend otherwise. A system like this would work quite well for the online kin to these kind of publications. ...

Second, there are an entire classes of content-driven sites which claim absolutely no pretense of editorial objectivity. Whether they are fan sites, directories, blogs, corporate advertorials, for-profit domain-specific portals, you name it, the tradition of sites which carry their biases proudly or are baldly commercial in nature is rich and growing, and IntelliTXT may well give these kind of sites a new monetization model.

Leaving aside whether directories, blogs, and fan sites are, or ought to be, commercial in nature, I'd say that at best the IntelliTXT model is annoying--in the same way that even editorial links can be annoying when the text is vague. In both cases, you aren't really sure what kind of information you'll get if you click.

IntelliTXT links are distinguished from editorial links by a green double-underline format. Vibrant Media CEO Doug Stevenson tells Battelle that the links are a service, and that the reader won't see the ad unless she makes a conscious choice to click an IntelliTXT link. But the format is not enough to distinguish them as ads to the casual user, at least at this point in IntelliTXT's life. And -- in the 2007 iteration, at least--you don't have to click on the link for the ad to appear. Just rolling over it does the trick.

It's also interesting that, according to Battelle, Stevenson basically argues that the links don't inherently represent a conflict because the publisher decides what words to link, so that if the links aren't appropriate, it's the publisher's responsibility. Battelle doesn't quote Stevenson's exact words, but if Stevenson did in fact mention only the publisher, I wonder why he doesn't think the editor should be the decision maker when it comes to links.

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Posted by Martha Spizziri on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 @ 9:25 PM
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Computerworld Steps Up to the Plate

Current ASBPE Magazine of the Year Computerworld recently discovered that some of the material in its Geek's Garden section had been lifted word for word from online sources. To their credit, they announced the lapse to readers on the front page of last week's issue. This week's editorial from editor-in-chief Don Tennant is devoted to the subject, offering a further apology to readers.

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Posted by Martha Spizziri on Wednesday, October 11, 2006 @ 9:29 AM
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Brand-New Local Mag CMO Takes Top ASBPE National Award

Photo: CMO Magazine cover
IDG publication CMO won the national ASBPE Magazine of the Year award in its division.
Anyone who hasn't looked at the ASBPE national web site lately may not have heard that CMO, a magazine only in its first year of publication, won the ASBPE 2005 Magazine of the Year award in the under-80,000 circulation division. Judges said that the magazine, whose audience is marketing executives, is “slick and smart,” with beautiful typography, plenty of entry points, and great cover design. CMO, based in Framingham, Mass., is an IDG publication.

Other Magazine of the Year finalists — those that finished in the top 10 in either the under-80,000 or 80,000-and-above circulation categories — from the Northeast region in ASBPE's competition included:
The Magazine of the Year award is only given at the national level.

Read about these and other ASBPE national winners.

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Posted by Martha Spizziri on Wednesday, June 29, 2005 @ 8:02 PM
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