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From the Web's beginning, in 1995, a debate has simmered over the ethics of online journalism. Most established media have maintained as clear a distinction online as they do in print between news and commerce. Pure dot-coms, by contrast -- and so-called portals, in particular -- have been willing, even eager, to pair editorial and sales in ways that aren't entirely transparent to readers.
For instance, major sites such as AOL's 29 million-member consumer service, Yahoo!, and Lycos have often charged publishers to place their logos and even headlines in prominent positions. To outward appearances, an editor at one of these sites has made a news judgment. But in reality, a promotional service is being rendered in return for a fee. What readers may interpret as the most important news of the moment can sometimes be the result of, in Web lingo, a business-development deal.
OLD RULES DON'T APPLY? The issue of whether the portal approach misleads readers -- as feared by such bastions of old media as the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) -- has never been resolved. On the rare occasions when the icons of the past have barked, the dot-coms have taken refuge under the mantle of progress, proclaiming themselves a new medium to which the old rules don't apply. Other times, they've harked back to the past, defining themselves as newsstands, not publishers -- and exempt from the influence of groups such as ASME. Case closed.
Until now.
AOL's purchase of Time Warner and its Time Inc. publishing unit -- a prominent ASME member -- has, overnight, transformed the world's largest and most profitable dot-com company into the world's largest and most prestigious magazine publisher as well. It has thus moved the debate over the Web's journalistic ethics from the realm of the theoretical to the intensely practical. The issue is: Whose standards should prevail -- those of AOL Time Warner the publisher or those of AOL Time Warner the newsstand aggregator?
That may sound like an esoteric issue, but it isn't. AOL Time Warner's publications have a reputation for journalistic integrity that required billions of dollars and the better part of a century to establish. One of the canons on which that reputation rests is avoiding conflicts of interest: For example, AOL the publisher would never sell a headline on the cover of Time magazine to the highest bidder. Any practice that even hints at diluting those standards potentially lessens the value of the assets for which AOL spent $110 billion.
PRIME EXPOSURE. At the same time, though, AOL the aggregator has developed a multimillion-dollar business selling what it calls "anchor tenant positions" on its news screens -- usually, logos that invite a reader to check out the news and are placed within the editorial confines of a Web page. (Yahoo! and Lycos, similarly, prominently display the headlines of publishers, depending on how much they're willing to pay.) Anchor-tenant deals promise prime exposure in return for cash payments -- such as Salon has made to AOL -- or a combination of cash and promotion, such as the $21 million, three-year deal CBS MarketWatch signed with AOL in September, 1999.
For now, at least, AOL Time Warner's position seems to be that its online service and its publications are two entirely different things. "Our members pay $21.95 a month in part because they expect us to pull the best of the Web together for them," says AOL Time Warner Vice-President Trisha Primrose. "Time Warner has a long history of journalistic integrity and independence, and nothing about that will change. America Online is a newsstand, not a news publisher."
Says another AOL Time Warner spokeswoman, Wendy Goldberg: "We partner with the best names in the business to bring readers news they can't find somewhere else." (Indeed, BusinessWeek Online appears on AOL but has opted not to be an anchor tenant.) Likening AOL's consumer service to a publisher is "comparing apples to oranges," Goldberg declares.
Certainly, it doesn't make sense to argue that AOL Time Warner's consumer service should live by the same strictures as the company's print publications just because both are owned by the same company. Different divisions live by different standards in many companies.
DEFINING RELATIONSHIPS. Still, now that AOL has acquired Time Warner, the distinction is suddenly blurred. For instance, is an AOL Time Warner online service that features such AOL Time Warner titles as Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Money, and People, among others, really separate from them? Or is AOL Time Warner simply publishing its renowned titles using its extremely effective online distribution system -- the AOL service?
"These are the kinds of questions that this merger will need to explain," asserts Aly Colon, a member of the ethics committee at the nonprofit Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank in St. Petersburg, Fla. "Users seeking news will need to know whether that information is being brought to them as the result of a business decision or a journalistic decision. There is a difference between news that editors believe the public needs and news that has been paid for by some content provider buying space on AOL. I do think those questions need to be addressed by AOL."
Colon also has a suggestion for a solution. "Part of the remedy may be through some pretty comprehensive disclosure that makes a clear distinction between these different kinds of information," he says. Indeed, that seems a simple enough answer. Just tell your customers: "You're looking at this link to CBS MarketWatch because MarketWatch paid to have it put here."
MORE CLICKABLE. So, why not do it? Probably for the same reason publishers that buy anchor-tenant spots on AOL or pay "slotting fees" for visible positioning on Yahoo! don't buy ads on those sites instead. Their assumption is that a news headline has a better chance of being clicked on by readers than an advertising link. In cases where money has changed hands, both sides have a financial interest in camouflaging the reason the link is there. In theory, at least, gaining attention under such pretenses should offend the morals of the top editors at places such as Salon and CBS MarketWatch.
But Salon Managing Editor Scott Rosenberg said in an e-mail responding to questions that he doesn't view the relationship as problematic: "I don't see any ethical journalistic concerns with anchor tenancy deals -- no ethical issues for Salon, anyway. (If I had the title of editor at AOL I might have some concerns, but that's AOL's problem, not mine)," Rosenberg wrote. "The anchor tenancies are business deals designed to generate traffic (remember, when AOL links to our stories its users wind up on our Web site -- the links point to our servers, AOL is not buying our content in any way). The logic of these deals is inevitable given the current structure of the Net business."
The issue for AOL Time Warner is more complex than for pure dot-com publications by virtue of the long association of the pre-merger Time Warner with both the Magazine Publishers of America, the magazine industry's trade group, and with ASME. These organizations have published joint guidelines entitled "Best Practices for Digital Media" that -- theoretically -- apply to the publications of AOL Time Warner the publisher.
PAYING FOR PROMINENCE. The guidelines say publishers should spell out when content is dictated by an editor's decision or a fee arrangement. "The distinction between independent editorial content and paid promotional information should remain clear," the guidelines state. "The site's sponsorship policies should be clearly noted, either in text accompanying the article or on a disclosure page..." That seems especially important in light of one description of how AOL -- rationally, for a dot-com -- traditionally has approached the decision to display information on its screens: "You pay to play on AOL," says one former AOL producer. "It's all about the money, not about editorial decisions."
Notes this same person: "Salon.com pays for prominent display of its content on AOL. If Salon decides it doesn't want to pay, AOL will go to someone else who will pay." In fact, Salon paid an up-front fee of $375,000 for prominent display on AOL last year. Salon has been paying $125,000 every fiscal quarter since. In a deal of much larger scale, CBS MarketWatch is an anchor tenant on AOL's Personal Finance channel -- one of the most heavily used Web sites for business news. In addition, links across several AOL news sections lead to a co-branded AOL/CBS MarketWatch site. And CBS MarketWatch headlines are placed across AOL, AOL.com, Netscape.com, and CompuServe, linked back to stories on the co-branded site.
Even to some journalists, this is just good business. Janice Castro, former editor of Time.com and now a faculty member at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, believes most people think of AOL as a newsstand. America Online is clearly separate from AOL Time Warner's magazine division, she argues, "so there may be a logical leap in suggesting that AOL should raise its journalistic standards for the online service."
Nonetheless, the merger raises important questions, Castro agrees, among them: "Should AOL adopt different standards now that it owns these highly respected journalistic organizations?" Or think of the question this way. What's the bigger risk: turning off some readers by telling them they're about to click on a link that someone has paid to display on AOL Time Warner the newsstand? Or not doing so, and perhaps tarnishing the image of AOL Time Warner the publisher?
Copyright 2001 , by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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