There certainly isn’t to me. So they are overreacting because they don’t like seeing themselves as motivated by money, yet the bulk of the successful ones there have written contracts that pay them more on tiers for pageviews and always talk about how many pageviews they get because that is their currency – a symbol stack.

The point I made at Science 2.0 was unlike Adam, I would not have taken any money. But unlike Scienceblogs, we would let Pepsi write for free and then only blast them if they attempted to use it for PR. But we won’t let any other institution do PR either, profit or not.

Adam is in a tough spot. He is $20 million in the hole and would love to get some of that back – so he did this to boost his site; if he gets a lot of institutions they are The Place to be, rather than Discover or Science 2.0 or Nature Networks, and people in the audience take them more seriously than they have in the past because of the all the anti-Republicans and anti-religion stuff. But now anyone who might want to buy it has to realize that a segment of the writers are pretty militant about the site not making money yet don’t want to write for free. How can he sell something when the writers will walk if it looks too corporate?

On the affront to boundaries between editorial/advertising, I lean in the other direction.

The more I think about this, the more I’m a “yes/no” answer to my own question. If that makes any sense. But again, this is from someone who isn’t a badged member of the ScienceBlogs community. if I was blogging there, I think I’d lean “no/no.” Maybe :)

I didn’t know there were even more corporate-sponsored “advertorial” spaces on ScienceBlogs. That makes me wonder harder (if that’s possible) what made *this* particular corporate blog launch stand out? It seems ScienceBlogs is defaulting to the “hey, this was business as usual” argument.

Is it an implied, hits-close-to-home subject matter (i.e. soft drinks/snack foods + obesity)? A critical mass of outrage reached when a global producer/aggressive marketer of so-called junk food sponsors an editorial food industry blog? Is it that no one really noticed the other corporate blogs before? Or that enough/the right bunch of ScienceBloggers (and their readers) noticed at pretty much the same time, and decided to say something about it?

Or did I simply miss the fever-pitch discussion about all of this in the past? (From a gander, the archived blog comments on these older blogs don’t seem to get anywhere close.)

Before I get any further, full disclosure: I’m dating BNL blogger Kendra Snyder, and I did a bit of PIO work during an internship at Ohio State University several years ago.

That said, there are fundamental differences that should be highlighted, if I understand your argument correctly about research institutions being the same as corporations when it comes to writing for ScienceBlogs.

One, PepsiCo is a for-profit corporation that has to answer to shareholders who want money (and lots of it). Two, they allegedly paid for blogging spot. Conversely, research institutions are not-for-profit enterprises that seek to support basic science research (not profit margins) and, as far as I’m aware, were invited to the ScienceBlogs party without any catches — including payment, and that’s from either party.

You absolutely have the right to want the “inside scoop” from non-PIOs working at research institutions. As a freelance journalist, I want the same thing. But I don’t think it’s fair to compare research institutions to corporations here. Yes, there are some loose similarities between the types, and there inevitably some crooked PIOs — just as there are crooked bloggers, crooked PR flacks, and crooked journalists, for that matter. At the end of the day, however, research institutions and corporations are distinct entities.

And thanks for the insight on the big traffic bloggers, your view on Laelaps and the money foodchain… all very good points.

As you note, Pepsi was not the first and you left out Dow, Schering-Plough and others. It seems writers at Scienceblogs were the only ones who didn’t know about this. But being PR organs for research institutions is no better and they have done even more of that. It used to be if someone was writing from CERN on Scienceblogs, we were getting scoop. Now we are getting PIOs and advertising barters with big organizations in return for access to the Scienceblogs audience.

No big traffic people are leaving Scienceblogs over this but I have always regard Laelaps as something of a moral compass there, so he is a loss. For the others, the money does matter, and where it comes from not so much, so they will stick around.

Hank

P.S. Are people overreacting? A little. But it generates pageviews and that is a big part of the culture.