Why does Newsvine Allow Political PR Organizations to Seed "Astroturf" Content?

Is it real grass roots journalism or is it astroturf?

Photo by Björn Láczay. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

As you may know I have voiced my concern in the past as to how Newsvine can be the target of inflammatory or inaccurate views, and hopefully Newsvine can make progress in promoting better content. Over the past few weeks it has seemed better overall, but then I discovered something very disturbing - something that in my opinion places into question how the Newsvine Code of Honor is enforced.

At first I really had no idea what I was up against when I look interest in a seed entitled "General Sanchez Rips the Media" from a publication called The New Media Journal. I was engaged in comments about coverage of Sanchez when the following exchange came along:

As for the troops, in almost ecah and every communication that we receive from soldiers in theater, they close their emails with, "Please keep telling the truth because the media isn't reporting what is actually happening over here."

PH: Who's "we"?

I am the managing editor of The New Media Journal. We recent thousands of emails a week from soldiers in theater and broadcast an Inernet show heard in military camps across the Middle East. That's who "we" is.

I found this to be a surprising thing: the editor of a publication was seeding content from his site onto Newsvine.

Just a one-time occurrence? Apparently not - this member has seeded more than 470 articles - with no original article contributions - all of them from The New Media Journal. Moreover, these articles are seeded with extensive keywording, indicative of an effort to make them more visible to search engines. This to me has all of the trappings of link farming - using a post to a Web site to use it as advertising for another Web site. While these articles are not written by the Newsvine member himself, acting as Managing Editor for The New Media Journal it appears to be that this having the same net effect as someone hiring a link farm service to promote their content through spam weblogs or other contrivances.

This advertising would be onerous enough unto itself, but then I started to investigate just who The New Media Journal is. It turns out that it is a member of The New Media Alliance, which is a foundation established by Heritage New Media Partners, Inc., a public relations company. The Heritage New Media Partners site lists as its primary service public relations, followed by media distribution (as in seeding PR on Newsvine) and research writing, as well as sponsoring The New Media Alliance, Inc. and TheRealityCheck.org. The New Media Journal site's metadata references The Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defense Fund, channels for funding for public relations efforts for conservative causes.

What is going on here is a little more clear if you look at just what The New Media Alliance is all about. It is a Section 501(c)(3) organization, a non-profit organization. As stated in The New Media Alliance Web site they manage efforts to provide exposure for sponsored political views:

Through the managed efforts of our writers and media partners we promote awareness and educate all Americans to the impact of government, educational and traditional media policies and agendas, that have become increasingly repressive and partisan. Our mission is, therefore, to help sustain America's most basic and cherished freedoms by aggressively empowering conservative thought and perspective.

In other words, the PR from this organization is designed to seed "spin" into the news cycle.

How does this relate to The New Media Journal? The New Media Alliance site provides additional information:

Through our parent company, Heritage New Media Partners, Inc., the NMA is actively engaged with various conservative organizations, think tanks and activist groups which seek talented writers and researchers to perform research or to become involved in media campaigns by writing articles, commentary or news pieces.

The NMA's pool of participating writers are eligible to receive writing or research assignments for such work and will be provided with grant money to do so.

If you are a writer and would like to be included in the NMA writers pool to receive such assignments, please let us know and you will be contacted for follow-up information.

It appears as if writers working for The New Media Alliance receive "grants" that enable them to write materials for channels such as The New Media Journal - sponsored content, or PR. The New Media Journal does not pay these people directly, so it will have the appearance of "citizen journalism". Instead, it's likely with this network of alliances that "grant" money for these authors is funneled to them indirectly via The New Media Alliance. This enables The New Media Journal to claim that it is only providing an outlet for its contributors, as stated in their site:

Opinions expressed by contributing writers are expressly their own and may or may not represent the opinions of The New Media Journal, its editorial staff or its publisher. Reprint inquiries should be directed to the author of the article.

It's bad enough that Newsvine is apparently being used regularly as an advertising vehicle for sponsored PR content, but worse yet that it's being done apparently to further political purposes. If we are to have real citizens' journalism, we need to have some confidence that content being seeded and written in Newsvine has some level of independence and it not being put here at the behest of organizations or causes who want to use Newsvine as "astroturf" - content that is meant to appear to be coming from the grass roots that is in fact sponsored for political or commercial goals.

I leave it to you to judge how much of a threat this is to Newsvine but I am quite concerned about it. Feel free to share your thoughts as to whether this constitutes a Code of Honor violation or something else that requires Newsvine's attention. In the meantime I have been reporting content from this source as advertising. I am concerned that there are any number of "astroturf" fronts on Newsvine, but this is the first time that I have seen what appears to be an "astroturf" publishing organization using Newsvine as a publicity outlet on such a broad scale.

UPDATE: From Calvin Tang:

The user fsalvato's column will be wiped clean, and he has been moved back into the Greenhouse, pending his acceptance of our request to him that he abide by Newsvine's rules. Thank you for notifying us of this blatant disregard for the CoH#3.

Astroturfers, beware!

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