Although myself and others here at Storage Monkeys have been railing about the need for transparency and honesty among bloggers, surprisingly few have adopted any ethical standards for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. The lack of disclosure is bad for the storage industry, it's bad for vendors, it's bad for the bloggers and it's real bad for the commercial publications that refuse to develop any standard for disclosure.
One of the regular offenders of this lack of disclosure is Network Computing (which recently folded Byte and Switch content into their site) and Information Week - both which are run by TechWeb, a division of United Business Media - a very, very big tech publisher in print and online media. One of their regular bloggers is George Crump - a self-proclaimed analyst whose latest job is to hit up storage vendors to write white papers for them. Beside the obvious ethical lapse in letting a guy whose living is dependent on writing vendor white papers write blog posts on their sites, Network Computing and Information Week further erode their own credibility by not disclosing the financial relationships their bloggers have with the vendors they write about. This would seem like a no-brainer... but not for Network Computing and Information Week.
Last week, Crump posted a blog titled "Scaling Backup Deduplication With Clustered Storage" which referenced a number of vendors - some which are suspected of being paid clients of Crumps. When confronted with the ethical breach on twitter last week, Site Editor Mike Fratto replied that "Mentioning vendors in a blog, story, or any other vendor is perfectly normal and acceptable." If you don't believe in the ethical standards of full disclosure, he's right.
To be fair, Crump, Network Computing and Information Week aren't the only ones without a standard for disclosure, but they are the only one that I'm aware of who understand the lack of disclosure and simply don't care.
This week's Infosmack Podcast discusses the issue and an interesting point about our industry self-policing against this lack of ethics was raised. In a Web 2.0 world, if you don't disclose a conflict of interest, someone will. In the shadow of new Federal Trade Commision rules that require bloggers to disclose conflicts of interest, Crump, Network Computing and Information Week would be better served to simply provide disclosures on their site.
Finally, it's a bad business practice for Information Week and Network Computing to let a vendor hack write blog posts on their site... after all, why would a vendor buy advertising on their site, they could just hire Crump.
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written by StorageGrrl, November 02, 2009
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written by dougc, November 02, 2009
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written by davemartinez, November 02, 2009
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written by jpolk, November 03, 2009
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written by RBruklis, November 04, 2009
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written by Howard Marks, November 23, 2009
I feel I must rise in defense of the bloggosphere. I've been writing about technology for over 20 years as a free lancer for PC Magazine, Network Computing, Network World and InformationWeek amongst others. I’ve also worked as a consultant to both end user organizations and vendors helping them with product management and training. Despite the fact that I regularly turned down assignments to write about or review products from vendors I was working for there was a constant stream of complaints that we/I were in the bag of some vendor/advertiser.
In all the years I wrote of print magazines I never met anyone from the sales side of the business or had an editor ask me to tone down a bad review because of an advertiser. At PC Magazine we used to run comparative reviews of every printer, modem database Etc we could find. Of course we looked through back issues to see what products had been advertised because it would look stupid to have a cover story “all 121 printers announced this year reviewed” next to an ad for one we missed.
I have been sued by advertisers that didn’t like their reviews and had the publisher stand behind me.
That said publishers don’t have the money to pay journalists like they used to. Also there are few people who understand the storage market and can write readable English. In the storage business writers/bloggers are almost all either working for vendors or analysts that take money from vendors. A very few consultants take time they could be billing customers $300/hr and blog. So many of us have conflicts of interest of one kind or another.
As I’ve shifted my business model from consulting and running a testing lab that did work for publications to running a testing lab that does work for vendors (Because the publications can’t pay the rent, power and equipment costs let alone a profit any more) I’ve given up writing about products from people I’ve done other business with and adopted a full disclosure policy. I was a real journalist too long to not believe in disclosure. The comment one analyst made that a white paper his firm wrote didn’t have to note that the vendors it covered were paying clients of the firm because “Everyone is a paying client of the firm” is disingenuous at best.
I’d love to be able to test and review products without taking money directly from vendors. I wish Curtis Preston the best with his project to build Consumer Reports for storage. Doing that is going to take serious coin. Think about what, and who, it takes to test a deduplicating VTL. I figure it’s a minimum of ½ a dozen servers, an FC SAN with 6-8TB of realistic data and a man-month or more of one of those $300/hr consultants. Can you pay for that? Would you pay $5,000 and help get 10 others to? If so, and we can get Sepaton or DataDomain to send a box free we can do some testing. If not in today’s environment the best we can hope for is vendor sponsored testing.
While I will take vendor money I have some limits. I design the tests, I run tests and I do it in my lab without the vendor looking over my shoulder. Then I write my opinions. The vendor can make comments but I have final cut so to speak on the report.
Even with those constraints, which are more stringent than some other folks, vendor testing has to lead to the Lake Wobegone effect where all results are above average. Vendors only hire folks like me to test products they have confidence in and if the results are disappointing may not distribute them.
That said I think they have at least as much value as the SPC testing of systems tuned within an inch of their lives and configured in ways real users never would (200 36GB 15K RPM drives) to run the benchmark fast.
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