This morning the N.Y. Times stock fell a little more than 7%: a response to lower than anticipated earnings and the announcement of fairly large scale lay-offs.
I don't think that bloggers can seriously be held responsible, but it does make the post here on the 19th, "Free Frank Rich" appear prescient.
Eschaton, as well as many other blogs, are right to mock demands for dicussions of "blogging ethics." The many complaints that bloggers don't follow 'journalistic ethics' are generally bogus and hypocritical.
Possibly this has been fully covered elsewhere, but I think that there are some moral issues that merit examination.
A lot of the best blogs are articles or comments based on a piece of breaking news. The blogger either links to the source, or quotes extensively from it. Thus the reader of the blog is constantly getting news from all kinds of sources, the wire services, news papers, TV shows etc. without paying a thing. While the blog generally gets some advertising revenue, the source gets no income. The company that pays the reporter find out the news and pays for its dissemination gets nada. Zilch.
When Eschacon, the meet-up of Atriots, was being organized, a blogger complained at the last minute that the hotel selected did not pay it's employees fairly. This person admitted that she did not contribute to the blog, but that she liked to read it. My impression was that this person felt that she should certainly get news and opinion for free. Further, she felt no responsibility to even contribute her ideas to the community which is the Blog. A tad hypocritical, IMHO.
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