Bad blogging at WIN

UPDATE: The WIN blog entry in question has now been greatly altered, in a rather disturbing manner. Details here.

If you're blogging professionally, people are going to hold you to higher standards than if you're just another guy in his pyjamas. Jason Kottke never understood that, I think, and now I wonder if that other Jason – Calacanis – really cares about it either.

Calacanis, of course, has famously sold his Weblogs, Inc empire to AOL; he is now rumoured to be moving on to bigger things. But someone is surely in charge of editorial content at WIN, and they should be taking their job extremely seriously now that everybody with a WIN blog is ultimately working for Time Warner. Apparently WIN has an editorial director named Judith Meskill, who might be an expert on "online social and knowledge networking practices and tools," but she doesn't have any journalism background, as far as I can tell, and she certainly can't write particularly well.

Jason Calacanis and Pete Rojas, of course, both know the media world very well: it's not like no one at WIN understands the issues involved in publishing information. But neither of them is likely to get involved in issues which arise at the level of individual blog entries.

So what happens when a WIN blogger publishes something which is lazy and wrong? Stefan Geens, over at Ogle Earth, called out WIN's Chris Gilmer yesterday for publishing something completely false: an entry about Google Earth which (a) displays an obvious lack of familiarity with the product, and (b) didn't receive even the most cursory fact-checking. Now Chris Gilmer is the primary author of The Unofficial Google Weblog, so one might presume that he knows a little bit about Google Earth. But if he doesn't, one might certainly presume that he'd bother to check easily-checkable facts before publishing something.

Now I've been following Jason Calacanis for long enough that I'm pretty sure what he would do if he found a false blog entry. In the interests of transparency, he would correct the entry to the best of his abilities, crediting whomever pointed out the mistake, all while being very open about the fact that WIN got it wrong to begin with.

But Chris Gilmer, it seems, is no Jason Calacanis. His blog entry was posted on Thursday evening. Later that night, Geens fisked it. Early the next morning, Frank Taylor, of Google Earth Blog, left a comment on Gilmer's entry pointing out the mistake and leaving a link to Ogle Earth in case Gilmer needed more information. Since then? Nothing.

Says Geens (who, full disclosure, is a friend and the designer of this site):

There has never been a case, in the US or elsewhere, where existing imagery has been switched for blurred images. Nor has the US ever asked for areas to be blurred, something which Google has confirmed. For a blog to say it has doesn't make it so.
Nevertheless, expect this meme to do the rounds now that a mainstream blog has validated it. Who watches the watchers, indeed? This kind of sloppiness gives blogging a bad name.

The implicit point, here, is that if Gilmer is going to blog professionally as part of the Time Warner empire, he ought to care about accuracy since he has something of a bully pulpit. Simply by dint of his blog's ownership, he has a high-profile mainstream blog which can and will shape conversations and opinions.

Everybody makes mistakes, of course, or has a bad day. But any time that happens to a blogger, he should embrace the fact that he can easily and transparently correct the error. The fact that that hasn't happened at The Unofficial Google Weblog gives WIN even more of a bad name than the fact that the error was made in the first place.

(By the way, on the subject of transparency, there seems to be no way of finding email addresses for WIN bloggers. I had no way of asking Gilmer or Meskill for their comments about this, because they refuse to publish any email or IM address by which I might be able to reach them.)

Posted by Felix at 18:47 EST

Comments

I'm looking into it. We hire well, looking for folks who have knowledge and passion about a subject. As you say folks make mistakes, and when you're running a blog network if you make mistakes people call you out on it (as you are here and others did in the comments).

The best thing about transparent blogging that if there is an error it gets fixed quick--as I think we've seen here (again, I'm still looking into this).

In terms of contacting folks there should be a tip form on every site. You can reach any exec at Weblogs, Inc. at firstname at weblogsinc.com.

best j

Posted by: Jason at 21:02 EST, March 10, 2006