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Cal Insider subject to editorial review: PC meddling or sound business plan?

Daniel Weintraub’s California Insider blog is essential reading for anybody interested in California politics (and who isn’t, given what a circus it is out here?). After a post on Cruz Bustamante got the legislature’s Latino caucus worked up, the Sacramento Bee announced that entries to Weintraub’s blog will now be reviewed by an editor before being posted. Predictably, the blogosphere is outraged. Hugh Hewitt, for example, blasts the Bee for political correctness in muzzling Weintraub:

Daniel Weintraub is the [Sacramento Bee's] best political columnist and reporter. ... Weintraub's blog ... was a genuine innovation in journalism, a decision to move one paper into the new century by equipping its best talent with a computer and a mission to report in real-time, thus moving an old-media dinosaur out of the swamp. Weintraub has consistently delivered scoop after scoop and most of his postings have shaped the news cycle that followed. Only Mickey Kaus has matched Weintraub for impact on the race and only the Bee has a web-based following because of original content on the web....

The Bee's powers have now decided to start supervising Weintraub. Why? Because the Latino Caucus complained about one of his entries.

It is a tough entry, one that blasts Cruz Bustamante and the Caucus. Weintraub is an opinion journalist, and in this particular posting his opinions on Cruz and his colleagues are not high. In fact, it deserves that classic phrase of journalistic approval: "hard-hitting."

So the Caucus blasted back. Usually an editor then stands up for the columnist and the paper's independence, citing a long tradition of press vigilance over entrenched political power and the glory of the First Amendment. Not this time.

Instapundit instantly jumped in too, to like effect, and most of the rest of the blogosphere has been quite exercised, as well. Even though I’m coming to the party a little late (I’ve been out of reach of a computer all day), and even though I largely agree with Hugh’s assessment of the controversial post, my take on all of this differs from that of most of the big bloggers. The issues at stake here are quite different from those implicated by the Rasmusen controversy a few weeks ago. Indiana University is a taxpayer-funded public school. When it censors a faculty member, it is acting as an agent of the state, and is subject to the First Amendment. In addition, a university is supposed to value academic freedom, even when the academic in question is not politically correct. (Of course, if universities really did value academic freedom we wouldn’t need organizations like FIRE or blogs like Critical Mass!) In contrast, the Sacramento Bee is a business. Yes, I know it’s a newspaper. Yes, I know a lot of people (including journalists) blather on about newspapers being a quasi-utility vested with a public interest. But that’s just the nonsense they use to justify a unique constitutional privilege to libel people and invade their privacy. In the real world, newspapers are for-profit businesses. The appropriate standard to apply to the Bee therefore is not the free speech standard applicable to a university but the emerging rules of business blogging. The California Insider is maintained on a corporate website. Weintraub has no more rights with respect to his blog than he does with respect to print articles. From this perspective, the right question is whether muzzling Weintraub was the right business decision. To answer that question, in turn, we need to think a bit about the relatively new phenomenon of corporate blogging. Why does the Sacramento Bee host the Insider blog on their site? It seems unlikely that the blog translates into significant additional sales of the print newspaper. Instead, I’d guess the business case is grounded on attracting eyeballs to the Bee’s website, on which site they seem to be selling advertising space. In either case, as a high profile part of the Bee’s web business, the Insider blog has a substantial impact on the Bee’s brand. The recent BBC imbroglio demonstrates that lack of editorial control of programming and even off-site editorializing by a media business’ reporters can adversely affect the business’ brand. The Economist’s Bagehot column last week opined:

To carry off the kind of scoop-driven journalism that the “Today” programme has aspired to recently needs not just aggressive reporters and news editors, but the guiding hand of a powerful senior editor too....

How should the BBC repair these defects? There are plenty of small things it could sensibly do, such as restricting the interviews between presenters and reporters—“two-ways” in the jargon—that often lead to stories being pumped up. It must also get a grip on staff correspondents who write opinion pieces in newspapers—an article by Mr Gilligan in the Mail on Sunday sprayed rocket fuel on the fire. But most of all, the BBC needs a powerful editor-in-chief, who, like the editor of a newspaper, would carry ultimate responsibility for news output and would therefore demand to be consulted over the handling of high-risk stories.

(Ironically, many of the Bee’s most vocal critics have also been vocal BBC critics!) If the brand the Bee wants to build is that of a left-leaning media outlet that caters to special interests, that is the Bee’s prerogative. If so, the Bee made the right call by putting in place a system of editorial review. As the sarcasm in the preceding paragraph should suggest to anyone but the most literalist reader, however, I think the Bee made a mistake. [UPDATE: In light of Hewitt and Reynold's responsive posts (see below), I wanted to highlight this observation. Even though I've tweaked this post a bit as the evening went on, this comment has been in it since the outset.] Not a free speech mistake, but a business mistake. Corporate blogging is a relatively new phenomenon. In some cases, it is used to help promote specific products. In others, it is used to pull eyeballs to a corporate website. In either case, corporate blogging has a credibility problem. The blogosphere is dominated by highly skeptical folks (e.g., the self-proclaimed “anti-idiotarians”). I suspect most blog readers are predisposed to assume that corporate blogs are just paid shills and, accordingly, also predisposed to discount (if not outright ignore) corporate blogs. I doubt whether corporate blogs can be used successfully to shill a particular product (except where the corporate sponsorship is hidden, but imagine how that could backfire if the sponsorship comes to light!). Instead, the right business model is to pull eyeballs to the site, where they can be shown banner adds, pop ups, and the other detritus of web commerce. How many people outside Sacramento would surf to the Bee’s website if the Insider were not there, for example? In order for this business model to work, however, the sponsor must adhere to the norms of the blogosphere. The blogosphere values immediacy, attitude, edge, and so on. The big referrers, like Hewitt, Volokh, Reynolds, and so on seem to especially value these attributes. If the Insider is perceived as having been muzzled by the Bee, the blog will get fewer referrals from the big guys and fewer readers will come to the corporate website. The problem for the Bee and other news outlets with in-house blogs is to balance the need to have editorial control to avoid problems like those plaguing the BBC while still playing by the rules of the blogosphere. It’s a tough job, no doubt. It will probably be a while before anybody gets it right. At this point, however, it seems likely that the Bee has just given us a case-study of how not to do it. UPDATE: Instapundit comments on my post:

[A]lthough Bainbridge is right that the Bee is perfectly within its legal rights to do whatever it wants to with things it publishes, the Blogosphere is perfectly within its rights to criticize the Bee and to point out that the Bee is behaving with all the commitment to public discourse that we'd expect from a big corporation like Enron or Disney. [Ed: Of course, the blogosphere is well within its rights to criticize. Where did I deny that, other than by being a bit snide about the 'sphere? Heck, I criticized the Bee.] Also, I think that Bainbridge is wrong to claim a contradiction between bloggers' criticism of the BBC's lax supervision of Andrew Gilligan with bloggers' criticism of the Bee's suddenly-intrusive supervision of Weintraub's blog. Weintraub is an opinion writer, who hasn't been accused of getting facts wrong. He's accused of stating political opinions that some people don't like.

Obviously, I think the BBC analogy has more merit to it than does Instapundit. Let me highlight a passage from the quote above from Bagehot: "It [i.e., the BBC] must also get a grip on staff correspondents who write opinion pieces in newspapers—an article by Mr Gilligan in the Mail on Sunday sprayed rocket fuel on the fire." That quote highlights a way in which I think Instapundit missed my point. My point was not that Weintraud did anything wrong. My point was to comment about the business issue -- the business model when it comes to a corporation sponsoring a blog. Inflammatory op-eds can do just as much damage to a business' efforts to build its brand as factual errors in straight reporting. And that was my point. Well, actually my point was that the Bee could logiically think so, although observant readers will note I went on to suggest that the Bee erred by not adhering to the very blogosphere norms about which Instapundit opines. UPDATE 2: The Instalanche has begun. For the benefit of new readers who came via that pointer, this blog focuses on corporate law and corporate governance, with a strong emphasis on current events implicating those topics (indeed, I see this post as a corporate governance post of sorts). Wine tasting notes are a favorite sideline, as are book reviews. UPDATE 3: Instapundit responds:

Weintraub (like a lot of other print reporters and pundits) "represents" the Bee in TV and radio appearances all the time without a Bee editor being interposed, even though a lot more people see those appearances than read a blog, making the "danger to the brand" much greater. I continue to blame jealousy and discomfort with new technology.

I agree. But if I owned a newspaper, I would ride herd on reporters who serve as "talking heads," just as I would ride herd on their op-eds for other outlets (see BBC remarks above). If they got too out of line, they would hear about it, just like I suspect the BBC's Gilligan has been hearing about it. (If he hasn't heard about it, he is at least being set up by his bosses as the fall guy.) Absolutely Final UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has blogged a response to this post too. Because this post was already way too long, I've responded in a separate post.