More on the recent WSJ article about the Dean campaign paying bloggers to write good things:
Sat Jan 15th, 2005
at 15:46:59 PST
For those of you unable to listen to the podcast of this interview here’s a transcript I typed up due to the fact that I have
entirely too much time on my hands.
* Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post on Zephyr Teachout’s recent post that seems to be stirring this pot.
* Laura Gross, who spoke to the WSJ, had this to say about the story:
I know many of you have questions so I wanted to give you the full
story. I am sorry I have not responded sooner, I have been traveling
all day with Gov. Dean and I’m in St. Louis now. Thank you for your
messages and e-mails . . . here’s the full story:
So I got a call Thursday from the Jeanne Cummings, The Wall Street
Journal reporter who covered the Dean campaign. By all accounts, she
did a fine job — covered all aspects of the campaign, even met the Web
team and wrote a long story on their work. She was calling, she said,
on behalf of some of her paper’s reporters in Boston who were looking
into a story about the campaign and the blogs.
She said she thought she knew what was going on, and we talked "on
background" so she could "just clear things up once and for all" —
that is, not for attribution. By the end of the conversation she had
confirmed what she thought — that there was no news, that this was
what she called a "dead story" — and said that she didn’t think there
would be any article at all, much less one that mentioned Dean. She
said that if for some reason she needed a quote she’d call me back.
Next thing I know there appears in the WSJ an article so sloppy and
so inaccurate that I spent the morning trying to track Jeanne down to
find out what happened. She called me back at 10:30 a.m. — and
actually apologized for the article (written by two colleagues). She
said that she wouldn�t work with those reporters in the same capacity
again, would only give them on-the-record quotes and assured me that
she had notified her editors.