By Daniel Green
For instance, less than a month before Gigaom announced its closure, veteran journalist and political commentator for the Telegraph, Peter Oborne resigned from the paper calling its shallow coverage of the role of HSB in tax evasion, “a fraud on its readers.”
“If advertising priorities are allowed to determine editorial judgments, how can readers continue to feel this trust?” He questioned in his article for Open Democracy.
It was this trust that Gigaom wished to uphold. Along with its stellar reporting and research, the organization had a reputation for high ethics. “A vendor might pay Gigaom hundreds of thousands of dollars for various services, but all that green didn’t increase the odds a reporter would cover it – or on the chance that someone did write an article, no amount of cash would tilt the opinion-meter even a hair toward the positive,” writes Jason Bloomberg for Forbes.
But it was the money from these advertisers that Gigaom needed to survive and thrive- the ultimate paradox of modern news business.
Read the entire article at http://www.socialmediatoday.com/technology-data/2015-03-31/gigaom-and-question-ethics-and-advertising-news-business.
