The Kotaku Question

Sony’s PR department seems to be suffering from the exact opposite of the Midas touch - everything they touch turns into shit. The latest peanut-in-the-poo is the Kotaku Debacle.

I can’t help but wonder if Sony’s abysmal PR over the past couple of years is going to be hailed as the supreme model of How Not To Do PR. I’m not going to go into what Sony have done wrong - because comments on the Kotaku articles have that covered; but this incident did remind me of a recent furore that erupted in the blogging community over Microsoft giving out free Acer Ferrari laptops loaded with Vista and Office 2007 to prominent bloggers. Sony’s PR team could learn a lot from Microsoft’s PR team - what those guys did was a stroke of genius (I’m going to write about this in a separate post).

A Popular blog starts its life as an unpopular blog that is little more than a repository for personal commentary (like this blog) in its chosen field of interest; but what happens to the blogger’s ethics when he gains a substantial number of readers and begins to wield political influence? That kind of power is a dangerous thing - it can corrupt with consummate ease.

One of the important things to remember is that most bloggers are blogging for nothing. They are not earning a living from their writing (unlike journalists). Does that make them more susceptible to bribery for good reviews / PR? I suppose it all depends on the sort of person who is doing the blogging.

Journalists are obliged to uphold ethical standards. Journalism is an old and established institution. Blogging is a relatively new institution - so there are bound to be teething troubles. History has taught us on many occasions that new forms of media tend to get confused with older forms of media. Blogging is no exception to that rule.

Kotaku seems to be saying that it has ethical standards; therefore Kotaku has journalistic integrity … but does that make the Kotaku bloggers journalists?