Month: March 2013

Guess Which Buzzfeed Piece Is An Ad, Ctd

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A bunch of readers are still sounding off:

Thought I’d bring this to your attention, vis-a-vis your back-and-forth with Buzzfeed: the Native Advertising Summit, “The first conference dedicated to defining and discussing the future of native advertising.” Unfortunately, the summit is mostly over, but I’m hoping there’s a stream of it. I know a lot of these people. They mean well, but try as one might, they have trouble understanding what the problem is with Native Advertising, starting with that atrocious name.

Another points to a troubling detail:

One big difference with Buzzfeed’s sponsored articles is that they appear in searches and are, still, undifferentiated from “real” articles. What other sites show the ads along with the editorial content? Up until now ads were ephemeral. They appeared on a site and were clearly ads. When the site is archived the ads were not (though the archives may also display ads). This extends the confusion far down the road. With sponsored content that is archived the ad, and any bias, extends well into the future. I am not sure what the consequences are but I doubt they are good.

Another reader isn’t too concerned:

Buzzfeed’s convolution of content and advertising seems like a pretty minor sin in the grand scheme of our modern media. Our media has been replete with sponsored content for decades in the form of DC elites leaking information and using journalist mouth pieces to win political arguments. The articles that Judith Miller wrote in the run up to the Iraq war are sponsored content, just not in the way we typically think about it. That kind of sponsorship is far more insidious than an advertisement made to look like content.

Another goes in depth with a helpful and revealing screenshot below:

Nobody expects BuzzFeed to be the standard bearer of modern journalism. But I think most people would want them to be honest brokers of their product.

If their product is cool stuff they found on the internet, then that should be presented as such. And unlike The Atlantic, almost nothing on BuzzFeed is original content – and that’s okay (kind of) because they almost always point that out and provide a link to the original source. Think of BuzzFeed as the Huffington Post of cat videos (it’s no coincidence that they both have the same founder – Jonah Peretti). But the problem is that BuzzFeed is scraping content from other sites and then using it to promote their sponsor’s products and they are doing so without sharing revenue with the actual creator of the content. Perhaps the content creator may get a ‘bump’ in internet traffic, but that’s all they’re ever going to get.

To illustrate the point (problem?) I took a screenshot of BuzzFeed today (February 22, 2013). In those spaces you can explicitly see the words “partner” or “featured partner” and brands that you recognize like Honda, Fuze, IFC and The Daily Beast. These are obviously ads. Maybe the content looks just like all the other stuff, but they aren’t fooling anyone.

But that is not all of the sponsored content on your screen. Not even a little bit. Most of the sponsored content is BF_022213_SC_ADS_Yellowhidden. Look at the posts I’ve highlighted in orange. The ‘Hot on the Web’ section is simply a collection of links to partner sites like The Onion, People Magazine and The Atlantic. The story about cyberbullying is an excerpt from a book by Emily Bazelon and sponsored by Random House – but you don’t find out about that until after you’ve read the whole article. That picture of Bert down at the bottom is an ad for Halls lozenges and the article about some guy selling his socks on ebay is just some guy pushing his own webpage. The music section is brought to you by streaming music company radio and the FTW badge is brought to you by Fuze – a registered trademark of Coca-Cola.  But I think the greatest offender is the headline story about Best Picture nominees which is brought to you by (Dunh! Dunh! Dunh!) The Academy Awards.

But on top of the ads marked as ads and the ads masquerading as content there are some gray areas where scraped content and advertising cross paths again, but the content isn’t necessarily sponsored by anyone. In these situations I’ve marked the content yellow.  In this grey area (yellow area?) we have Andrew Kacynski “writing” what is simply a repurposed press release from the WWE, another repurposed press release from Billboard magazine and another glorified press release about an innovative use of the White Album from website Dust and Grooves. There’s a suspiciously in depth description of an incident on the Kathy Griffin show, as well as posts which are lifted almost verbatim from their sources – a liquor infographic taken in its whole from an artist on the Behance network and a video of some kid dissing the NBA that’s been lifted from Los That Sports.

BuzzFeed’s problem isn’t that there’s an unmarked article here or there that’s just a glorified advertorial, like The Atlantic. BuzzFeed’s problem is that it’s all glorified advertorials, with the occasional piece of ‘original’ content (and by ‘original’ content, I mean something they scrape from somewhere else and only casually make reference to the actual original, if they make mention at all).

Update from a reader who objects to the problematic previous entry:

The reader may take offense with the re-appropriation of content on BuzzFeed found on other websites, but the posts marked in orange and yellow are not sponsored stories. That is to say, BuzzFeed received no compensation from any of the so-called “sponsors” of any of those stories. Every piece marked in orange or yellow was either written independently by editorial staff at BuzzFeed or, in the case of the stories from other publishers in the “Big Stories” column or the row of thumbnails on top, link directly to those publisher’s websites.

Suggesting that these are “ads” or toeing the line into advertising is a fairly ridiculous standard – the cover story that is supposedly “sponsored by the Academy Awards” is a timeline of each Best Picture nominee’s path from conception to actually being made, written by Richard Rushfield, a veteran entertainment reporter formerly of the LA Times. “Copyranter” is a paid blogger at BuzzFeed (his writing is no more sponsored than your “Cool Ad Watch”), and since when is publishing book excerpts or covering press releases considered advertising? Held to this standard, much of the entire blogosphere would be considered advertising, including the Dish.

I work in the business department at BuzzFeed and spent most of the day following your talk defending the valid points I thought you made. But do please try to avoid publishing unfounded accusations (like the suggestion that the writer of the Sony ad wrote its subsequent product review on the site). It hurts your credibility and takes attention away from the much more pertinent, and important, criticisms you have to make.

Another reader:

Longtime reader, new subscriber to the Dish. Like you, I am also suspicious of the sponsored posts on Buzzfeed, but I’m not sure it’s unprecedented. My mother spent many years working at Newsweek in charge of producing the magazine’s special sections.  These sections were written in a different font than the magazine, but were in center of the book and were essentially advertorials.  Special sections were on subjects as varied as heart health, fall fashion, the national parks, etc.  My mother got writers who were experts on these subjects to write articles, and the sections drew in advertisers who wouldn’t normally buy ads in a general interest publication.

The articles in these special sections was not written by the advertisers per se, but they definitely were not written by Newsweek’s journalists.  The purpose of the special sections was too draw ad dollars, so they usually weren’t hard hitting,  And there’s no question that they emerged from the business side of the magazine. It’s not an exact analogue to what Buzzfeed is doing, but it isn’t that much of a departure either.

Another:

This blurred line isn’t new; it’s just new to the Internet. Radio announcers have been doing it for nearly a century. You listen to local DJs with a wide audience, and in between jokes and gags they launch into a 3-minute soliloquy about the newest Italian joint in town, live on air as part of the “show”. At no point do they reference that it’s sponsored content or an advertisement. But regular fans of the show catch on mostly due to repetition and the fact that the content slides into an “uncanny valley” of entertainment. Buzzfeed readers will figure out the cues too. I’ve already begun to.

Update from a reader, who counters the previous one:

This may have been true a century ago, but for decades it has been illegal.  Fine-and-imprisonment illegal.  A sponsored mention must be identified as such, as part of the mention itself.  Radio staff must not only sign affidavits saying they understand this policy, they also must annually view presentations about the policy and pass an exam about it.  That’s how illegal it is.

Are there still blurred lines?  Yes; you’ll still hear a DJ thank Taco Bell for dropping off samples of that new item on their menu, it tasted great.  But that will last 15 seconds or less, it will be recorded and logged.  3-minute soliloquies about ANYTHING on a music radio station are the kiss of death anyway.

Another on radio ads:

I had an interesting realization this morning on the way to work: I listen to moderately disguised sponsored content on the radio all the time. I love Philly Sports radio and tune in any time I’m in a car. Their ad model includes their popular personalities endorsing products in their own voice without a clear delineation between content and ads. The ads are unmistakeably about products, but sometimes are so woven into the discussion at hand and so tonally similar that it’s hard to tell.

The interesting realization, given my general agreement with you on the issue, is that in that context I honestly don’t mind at all and – egad! – I’ve actually purchased some products that were advertised. I can’t recall ever buying anything because of a web ad, but our mortgage, wedding rings, and some home electronics are all from “sponsored content” I heard. Sure, radio is a totally different medium, but I now find myself much less offended by sponsored ads in general. My only remaining caveat (and The Atlantic’s giant screw up) is that the editors need to have no problem associating their good name with the product at hand.

One more:

As a paid up Dish-head, I wanted to email in about my total boredom with your series on Buzzfeed. Every time I read one of your pieces, I want to scream the same thing over and over again: If anyone is unhappy with what Buzzfeed (and the like) is doing, don’t bloody read it! No one is holding a gun to your head.

Like many Internet users, I occasionally visit Buzzfeed. There’s the decent item here and there, they do a mean gif round-up and their reactions to big events always give me a minute or two of amusement. As a user of a free site, obviously you expect ads, and if they happen to be a bit more clever than the usual dirge offering pills, penis enhancements and amazing ways to make money, in the grand scheme of things, who gives a damn? No one who visits Buzzfeed is going there for thought-provoking, independent journalism – they do some decent political titbits, but titbits are all they are.

Why the hell are you taking it so seriously? The market will soon sort them out if their advertising strategy turns out to be be a sea of deep, insidious evil. Please drop this silly subject – there’s far more important things going on that we want your insight and input on.

The Anti-Ideologue

Reviewing Oakeshott on Rome and America by Gene Callahan, Kenneth B. McIntyre describes what keeps Oakeshott from accompanying fellow British philosophers into America’s intellectual canon:

oakeshottcaius[His] lack of influence among the movers and shakers of American political life should not be surprising,given Oakeshott’s insistence on the irrelevance of political philosophy to practical politics. As he once wrote, “reputable political behavior is not dependent upon sound or even coherent philosophy.” Such behavior is instead related to the concrete practical knowledge of an actual political tradition and what such a tradition intimates.

Oakeshott was skeptical of philosophers who meddled in practical affairs, insisting that he was not concerned with establishing “a seminary for training political hedge-preachers in some dim orthodoxy.”

No, that was Leo Strauss’s metier. Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz are where you end up (or just read Ravelstein). Oakeshott – for fear of being dragged into partisan politics – even refused a knighthood engineered by Margaret Thatcher, who wanted to elevate him as a “movement intellectual”, as if such a thing weren’t an oxymoron. One other thing that distinguishes him from the neoconservative advocates or permanent warfare, as explained on his Wiki page:

Although his 1939 essay ‘The Claim of Politics’ defended the right of individuals not to become directly involved, in 1941, Oakeshott joined the British Army in its fight against Nazi Germany. He was on active service in Europe with the intelligence unit Phantom, which had SAS connections, but he was never in the front line.

He served his country for the rest of the war against the Nazism he despised.

Scouting For Straights

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A reader writes:

You’re usually the last person I’d send a Sports Illustrated article, but this one’s too important to pass up. I don’t know if you’ve been following the story about Nick Kasa, but essentially, this is a college kid, ready for the NFL, and he got caught telling the truth about the interview process teams do before the NFL Draft. Namely, teams are asking potential players, both directly and indirectly, if they’re gay.

So Ed Schultz, of whom I must admit to being no big fan, interviewed one of my favorite players, Brendon Ayanbadejo, a recent Super Bowl champion who used to play for my hometown Chicago Bears. Ayanbadejo, as you know, has been an outspoken advocate of LGBT rights, one of the few NFL players to do so. But he went on Schultz’s show and encouraged rookies, for the sake of their own personal careers, to, if they are gay, lie about their sexuality, since it could be the difference between getting picked higher and getting picked lower, along with the obvious salary differences.

While I find it refreshing to hear someone tell the truth for a change – that players interested in their own careers need to do what’s best for them – this just makes me more and more frustrated with my favorite sport.

I can deal with the homophobes in the locker room; I’ve met enough of them in the real world to know that they’re usually all talk and often are converted to being lesser douchebags as they have their worlds opened up to new ideas. But that NFL scouts and executives, the most powerful people in their leagues, would be asking these kinds of questions … that’s what I find truly depressing. Most of these aren’t people with deep-seated religious or ethical beliefs; they’re just worried about having the next PR story be about “their gay.” How thoroughly disgusting that they’d pick THIS to focus on.

The best player to ever play for my Bears is named Brian Urlacher. He was dumb enough to impregnate a woman who had already been convicted stalking Michael Flatley – yes, the Lord of the Dance himself – much to the consternation of Urlacher’s wife. How is that somehow more moral, more Christian, or less of a PR crisis than simply being attracted to other dudes?

Ugh. Sorry for the vent. This shit just drives me bonkers.

By the way, Ayanbadejo, along with fellow NFL player Chris Kluwe, just filed a joint Supreme Court brief in support of overturning Prop 8.

Obama’s Exquisite Balance On Marriage

As regular readers know, I have always been a federalist when it comes to marriage equality, and have long preferred legislative decision-making to judicial intervention on the matter. That was one of the core disagreements between me and Evan Wolfson many many years ago when we were both devoting much of our lives to the project. I did not want one state’s decision – back then it was Hawaii’s court – to apply to every other one. And indeed, as we have seen, that hasn’t happened, and wouldn’t have happened even if DOMA had remained just a gleam in the GOP’s id. It never happened for over a century of different marriage laws in America with respect to race, age and consanguinity.

And I confessed recently that if we got a gay Loving vs Virginia this June, I would certainly weep for joy. But in a country still divided 50 – 50 on the issue, I think my tears can wait. And that’s why I think the Obama DOJ has taken exactly the right approach in both joining the Supreme Court suits over Prop 8 [PDF] and DOMA [PDF] and in making the simple and modest arguments they have. They both understand and express for the first time the systemic discrimination gay Americans have lived under for centuries, and they are small-c conservative, in that they stop short of a full-scale federal equal protection argument that would mandate marriage equality across the entire country at once.

Lyle Denniston, as usual, has a superb analysis. On Prop 8, Obama has not changed his moderate ways (and we’re told he was engaged in this brief). Money quote:

The Court can resolve this case by focusing on the particular circumstances presented by California law and the recognition it gives to committed same-sex relationships, rather than addressing the equal protection issue under circumstances not present here.

I agree. Basically, the administration is arguing that if you give gay couples all the rights and responsibilities of marriage, but withhold the name, you are discriminating less rationally than those who refuse to give gay couples any rights at all. You are legislating only stigma. And on the DOMA question, the brief argues that if a state recognizes a marriage, the federal government should defer to the state, as was the case throughout American history until 1996.

very-gradual-change

I just came from Idaho, debating a fundamentalist Christian writer and pastor, Douglas Wilson. The crowd of over 800 at the University of Idaho was full of members of his congregation, as well as students, and we debated civilly if passionately, and at the end of the debate a huge majority sided with him over me. Maybe over time, some of the points I made will resonate. Maybe they won’t. But what I do know, from my own experience, is that people can change their minds in a short period of time.

Only a short drive away from where I was speaking is Washington State, where marriage equality is legal. You can see this border – where I was instantly re-married as we drove in a pick-up truck across the border – as bizarre and incoherent (which, of course, it is), but you can also see this as something worth celebrating about such a vast and diverse country as this one. Opinion in those states differ widely – and in a democracy public opinion must count. Before Idaho, I was in Oregon, speaking on the same issue. Next year, that state looks likely to be the first one to overturn a constitutional ban on marriage equality at the ballot box. You want proof that argument and reason and time can work in a democracy? The marriage equality movement is Exhibit A: person by person, generation by generation, state by state.

Not only has federalism allowed those of us in favor of marriage equality to demonstrate that no bad consequences will come by giving gays the right to marry (Washington State’s divorce rate is lower than Idaho’s; divorce rates across the country have fallen in the decade when marriage equality became a burning issue; the first gay marriage state, Massachusetts, has the lowest divorce rate in the country); it prevents the imposition of an institution on people who do not want it or believe in it. This is what makes me a conservative, I suppose. Toleration is a two-way street. I loathe the idea of coercing anyone’s conscience, or allowing any one, central institution to enforce a one-size-fits-all solution on a diverse country, where conscience is at stake, where religious freedom matters, and where public opinion remains deeply divided.

I can see and appreciate the full liberal argument that Obama has not fully embraced. Couldn’t my gradualist, federalist, democratic argument, after all, have been made of the anti-miscegenation laws that once desecrated this country?

And the answer is yes. But mores evolve in a society; change occurs in the conscience and consciousness over time. The job of a conservative is to argue the case, when she sees fit, for change – but only when change is designed to retain the coherence of a society, not to do damage to its sense and understanding of itself. The Christian witness of Martin Luther King Jr and the simple dignity of Rosa Parks and the organizational genius of Bayard Rustin and the moral witness of so many, black and white, is what made the Voting Rights Act possible. Was America before that an unjust society? Yes. But by embracing that change, America became, in my view, more true to its founding documents, to its essential nature, than it was before. A conservative seeks to balance justice with the dispersal of power, the coherence of a culture, and the common, contingent meaning of a polity, its traditions and customs.

NPG 655,Edmund Burke,studio of Sir Joshua ReynoldsBut sometimes – in fact, often – you have to change an institution in order for it to stay the same. That was Burke’s insight, not Mill’s. And that’s why I have always held that marriage equality is as conservative a cause as it is a liberal one. Once gay people fully and finally owned their own equality in their own families, and their own families responded, once centuries of internalized self-hatred and oppression and criminalization gave way to self-worth and pride and freedom, keeping gay people out of their own families became, in fact, an attack on the family as it had actually evolved in this country. The humanity of gay people – intensely proven in the crucible of the plague – won out both within our own souls and the souls of others. And it was that shift in consciousness and culture that prompted legal reform. I think in a democracy, you change hearts and minds first if possible; then you change the law. And when you change it, you do so with caution, especially with a vital social institution like civil marriage.

That’s why DOMA was so pernicious. It made the federal government the sole arbiter of civil marriage when that judgment had always been left to the states. DOMA pre-empted the national debate and tried to shut it down. Mercifully, it did not prevent any states from embracing marriage equality if they wanted to; but for the first time in history, it said the federal government would not simply recognize the states’ decisions. That was wrong on conservative and federalist grounds. It was a key moment in the take-over of conservatism by religious fundamentalism. It was a declaration of war by a government on its own citizens. It was a mile-stone in the degeneracy of American conservatism.

The second argument the Obama brief makes in the Prop 8 case is neither conservative nor liberal. It assumes that if you oppose marriage equality in a democracy, you have to do so for a substantive reason, because the minority involved has been the object of such discrimination in the past. For the first time, the American government acknowledged that centuries of criminalization, stigma, cruelty and forced invisibility, and declared that “the undisputed twentieth-century discrimination has lasted long enough.”Hence the embrace of the judicial notion of “heightened scrutiny” when assessing laws that single out this minority for further discrimination by their own government.

If the reason is that the rights and responsibilities of marriage are inherently heterosexual, because of procreation, you have a very weak case, given what civil marriage now is for straights, and after the ubiquity of contraception, weddingaislebut you have a case. But if you have conceded the substance of the argument and granted gay couples all the rights and responsibilities of civil marriage – but denied them the symbolism of the the name – you are creating a separate but equal form of legal segregation that does nothing and can do nothing but express animus toward a minority or the need to segregate them from a common, binding institution. That simple segregation – without an argument – violates core civil equality. And there are eight states – California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, and Rhode Island – that have laws that can only be understood as expressing the civil inferiority of gay couples. That must, in my view, end. And it can end without a resort to a sweeping federal decision across all 50 states.

What must also end is the federal government’s unconstitutional decision to distinguish between the marriage licenses in any given state where it is the law on the basis of gender. My marriage license in Massachusetts, New York and DC is indistinguishable in every respect from my heterosexual peers. The federal government has no business getting involved and creating a distinction. In fact, it has no way of actually telling from the licenses themselves which are gay and which are straight. It must infer that merely from our first names. When the feds are poring over a state’s marriage license to analyze the first names of the couple, it is way over the line. On almost any other issue, federalist conservatives would agree with that.

Which is why Obama is both advancing a liberal goal of equality with a small-c conservative concern for gradual change based on moral, empirical and spiritual evolution. He leads, like every Tory should, from behind the people he represents.

The Man With The Internet Money

As the Atlantic continues to whore itself out to corporate spokespeople-as-journalists, and as Buzzfeed develops an advertizing model designed entirely to trick readers into clicking on ads thinking they’re editorial copy, one dude has done the same thing for almost two decades, and has just a simple, clear advertisement on his site, obviously distinguished from his trademarked fusion of gossip, camp and Republican propaganda. His name is Matt Drudge, and he now has a huge, vast compound to luxuriate in.

I never thought the Drudge Report would be a more ethical site in terms of advertizing than the Atlantic. But it is; and it makes a profit as well.

The Right And Marriage Equality

Another green shoot from the Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro. Cato, of course, has long been one critical part of the conservative coalition not hostile to the equality and dignity of gay citizens. Money quote:

Prop. 8 denies gays and lesbians the liberty to marry the person of their own choosing, places a badge of inferiority on same-sex couples’ loving relationships and family life (with the full authority of the state behind it), and perpetrates an impermissible injury to these individuals’ personal dignity. It thus directly subverts the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, and is an affront to the inalienable right to pursue one’s own happiness that has guided our nation since its founding.

Canine Cannabis

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Julia Szabo reports on rogue veterinarians and pet owners who risk arrest to ease the pain of sick dogs. Dr. Doug Kramer lost a much-loved Husky to cancer:

After studying the latest research on cannabis, he was moved to develop a homemade tincture and saw firsthand how it restored Nikita’s appetite and allowed her to enjoy her final months to the fullest. After Nikita’s death, Kramer resolved to safely harness medical marijuana, aka MM or MMJ, to benefit other animals with incurable and terminal diseases. He’s become an outspoken, tireless advocate of pain control for animals and has established a veterinary practice, Enlightened Veterinary Therapeutics, specializing in palliative and hospice care. He’s the first vet in the country to offer cannabis consultations as part of a comprehensive treatment plan for pet patients.

In doing so, Kramer is putting his professional reputation on the line and risking jail time. Veterinarians cannot prescribe MM for patients; it is illegal because cannabis is defined as a Schedule I drug by the FDA. “The decision was an easy one for me to make,” he says. “I refuse to condemn my patients to a miserable existence for self preservation or concerns about what may or may not happen to me as a consequence of my actions. My freedom of speech is clearly protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. This is an issue of animal welfare, plain and simple. Remaining silent would represent a clear violation of the veterinarian’s oath I took when I was admitted into this profession.”

(Hat tip: MeFi. Photo by of a dog with lymphosarcoma by Flickr user carterse)

The Cracks In Keystone

Michael Grunwald sticks up for the anti-Keystone activists, who a few weeks ago held, in the words of Bill McKibben, “the biggest global warming rally in history”:

[There’s] an emerging consensus-among newspaper editorial boards, respectable-centrist pundits, even the magazine Nature – that the rabble-rousing activists who have tied themselves to the White House gate and clamored for President Obama to reject the Keystone XL pipeline are picking the wrong fight. Stopping Keystone, these critics point out, wouldn’t prevent catastrophic warming. It might not even prevent the extraction from Canada’s dirty tar sands. It wouldn’t cut emissions as much as new coal regulations or clean-energy subsidies or carbon pricing. Meanwhile, approving the pipeline would create jobs and reduce our dependence on petro-dictators while signaling that Obama isn’t as radical as the tree huggers protesting outside his house.

Well, I’m with the tree huggers. The pipeline isn’t the worst threat to the climate, but it’s a threat. Keystone isn’t the best fight to have over fossil fuels, but it’s the fight we’re having. Now is the time to choose sides. It’s always easy to quibble with the politics of radical protest: Did ACT UP need to be so obnoxious? Didn’t the tax evasion optics of the Boston Tea Party muddle the anti-imperial message? But if we’re in a war to stop global warming — a war TIME declared on a green-bordered cover five years ago — then we need to fight it on the beaches, the landing zones and the carbon-spewing tar sands of Alberta.

Mari Hernandez highlights an alternative to Keystone: Canadian hydropower.

Fighting Fire With Holograms

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Emily Elert reports on a breakthrough in optic technology that would allow firefighters’ infared cameras to see clear images of victims behind smoke and flames:

[I]n the midst of a raging inferno, heat from the flames will overwhelm the camera’s sensors and obscure nearby objects. Researchers in Italy may have found a solution: a digital imaging system that captures infrared signals in 3-D and converts them to holographic video in real-time, thus allowing firefighters to distinguish flames from heat-emitting objects behind them.