Posted by Ken Waldron
on November 1, 2009, 2:20 pm
...The fashionable media model is for newspapers to give their contents away free on the web and rely on advertisers for money, a strategy that will inevitably give commercial interests the muscle to be censors. Instead of wondering what might happen to investigations into corporate tax avoidance in future, bloggers welcomed advertisers' attempts to dictate an editorial line by citing the boycott as "a brilliant example of how reader power in the new media age can hurt newspapers".
A mob fighting a good cause is still a mob. To fight back, you need to remember that although the internet age is hugely expanding the number of complaints, the old rules still apply. Whether you are the owner of a tiny blog or the editor of a national newspaper, if someone points out an incorrect fact, you correct it; if someone challenges an argument, you argue back; and if someone says that you must think what they think, you ignore them.
More here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/01/nick-cohen-andrew-neil-jan-moir
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