It is a task often relegated to the office interns: posting promotional content to outside social media sites.

Despite the fact that this practice is officially frowned upon in the Federal Trade Commission’s 2009 endorsement guidelines, companies will often engage paid individuals – either employees on the payroll or outside bloggers who receive compensation in the form of a free sample – to post positive reviews online, including to places like Twitter, personal blogs, or online public forums without identifying the connection between the commenter and the product being commented on.

The FTC’s endorsement guidelines seek (among other things) to ensure that unbiased positive reviews online can be considered credible, while also ensuring that positive reviews that are partially the result of some sort of compensation be acknowledged as such. Continue reading

Unlike traditional newsroom journalists, “citizen journalists” have no formal way to ensure that everyone maintains similar quality standards.  Which does not mean that quality standards are necessarily (or consistently) maintained at traditional newsrooms, but rather that a traditional hierarchical editorial structure imposes at least theoretical guidelines.

By definition, citizen journalism’s inherent difference from the traditional editorial process is the dispersion of responsibility for editorial choice.  Nonetheless, “trustiness” in journalism is a concept still heavily dependent on a reporter’s or editor’s reputation.  Is the New York Times trusted because it’s trustworthy?  Or is it trustworthy because it’s trusted?

The “Generated By Users” journalism blog recently reported the results of its reader poll, “Do you TRUST user generated content in news?” Continue reading