There's nothing wrong with paid content, if that's what it is, but there ought to be a way to distinguish paid from organic content. One thing I do like about traditional journalism is the attempt to separate "journalism" and "opinion", and the attempt to maintain high integrity in the former.
With everything moving online and into arbitrary structures, it's difficult to know what I'm reading. I don't want to suspect that everything I read is secretly a paid advertisement or involves some kind of kickback, but an article that's biased so strongly in favor of its subject and presents no alternative views, not even for the appearance of some degree of impartiality, reads like an article that was written around a predetermined conclusion. Which again is OK, but I want to know what type of content the page I'm reading alleges itself to be.
I am wary of reading a "submarine" and not knowing it: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
There's nothing wrong with paid content, if that's what it is, but there ought to be a way to distinguish paid from organic content. One thing I do like about traditional journalism is the attempt to separate "journalism" and "opinion", and the attempt to maintain high integrity in the former.
With everything moving online and into arbitrary structures, it's difficult to know what I'm reading. I don't want to suspect that everything I read is secretly a paid advertisement or involves some kind of kickback, but an article that's biased so strongly in favor of its subject and presents no alternative views, not even for the appearance of some degree of impartiality, reads like an article that was written around a predetermined conclusion. Which again is OK, but I want to know what type of content the page I'm reading alleges itself to be.