Terminology Watch: “Blogola”

The Soup Nazi had every right, IMHO.

“I hope you like it,” wrote Ms. Marie in an email to CBS to flag her “Old Christine” posting. “If there’s anything you’d like me to add, just tell me and I will.” She signed the note, “XOXO.”

To Create Buzz, TV Networks Try A Little ‘Blogola’ (W$J)

Trying to tap into the burgeoning power of blogs as promotional tools and fed up with the jaded attitudes of professional critics and TV feature writers, studios and networks are flooding bloggers with free stuff in hopes the flattered recipients will reward them with positive coverage.

A publicist for a new television series with that actress — you know, the token female character on Seinfeld, the publishing industry flack — is quoted as telling the W$J that “newspaper feature writers aren’t even worth her time.”

I often feel the same way, as a reader.

I dislike Seinfeld, by the way.

I always have.

It’s not a violent dislike, mind you.

It’s just that in reruns, madcap antics that may have made me giggle slightly the first time around — or not — now leave me cold as stone.

But hey, de gustibus non disputandum, right?

Flowing into the trough is everything from fancy gym bags and toasters to video iPods and free trips. Some networks — in the spotlight this week as they unveil their fall schedules to advertisers — have even borrowed a term from the technology industry to describe the strategy: blogola.

The term comes from the technology industry? Really?

It plays on the term “payola,” does it not?

Payola, in the American music industry, is the illegal practice of payment or other inducement by record companies for the broadcast of recordings on music radio, in which the song is presented as being part of the normal day’s broadcast. Under US law, 47 U.S.C. § 317, a radio station can play a specific song in exchange for money, but this must be disclosed on the air as being sponsored airtime, and that play of the song should not be counted as a “regular airplay“.

In other words, selling your editorial independence, lying to the public and conspiring to rig the free, open and competitive market for infotainment.

See also astroturf.

Until the 1980s, when news outlets started devoting more space to business coverage and reporters began peering more intently behind Hollywood’s curtain, many mainstream writers were showered with gifts. The result was usually fawning coverage. Networks would like nothing more than to re-create that system with blogs.

Because bloggers either don’t know enough, or don’t care, to disclose conflicts of interest.

There are plenty of people around these days who will try to sell you on the idea that this is Journalism 2.0 — a feature, not a bug.

Blogola.

Great word.

I am going to use it often.

Award-winning “journalism innovator” Global Voices Online strikes me as nothing but one big — partially government-funded? — blogola scheme, for example.

News Web sites that regularly feature “news” from the “virtual world” of Second Life?

That strikes me as a form of blogola as well.

Only, of course, in that case it’s the professionals who are selling out like West Side Highway crack whores — for money, rather than love.

See NMM(-TV)SNBCNNBS: Brazil’s Rede Globo on Second Life for a recent example.

And see also “It’s Like Magic,” in which Brazil’s Veja magazine — “the most influential newsmagazine in Brazil,” according to the Associated Press — typecasts itself as a West Side Highway crack whore with a heart of gold.

Oh, and “The Sweet Teat of Junket Whoredom”: The Public Editor on “Fighting Toadies,” on how the New York Times handled the crisis of confidence in its journalistic integrity.

Even the Dow Jones Newswire has been infected: see Dow on Dow Violence in Flogging Flap.

I’m working on a colorful term of my own: blogotá.

Trading on the Colombian capital’s reputation for parapolitics — confusing the boundaries between the permissible and the unconscionable, the transparent and the skeevy.