Saturday, January 15, 2005

Apparently We've Been Here Before

Ed Cone, October 2003



The blogging scandal that wasn't.

Lots of blogging goin' on claiming that this article says the Dean campaign is paying independent bloggers for their kind words. Suspects named in various blog commentary range from Oliver Willis to Glenn Reynolds .

Not so, says Dean blogger Zephyr Teachout. "We have one paid fulltime blogger, that's Matt Gross. I am a paid staffer, I blog sometimes, but mostly do online organizing." She says nobody who is not a staffer gets paid to blog for Dean.

I also asked Alex Bolton, the staff writer at The Hill who wrote the article, if he meant to imply that any blogger other than those appearing on the Dean campaign weblog is getting paid by the campaign. "No," said Bolton. "I meant people contributing to Dean's own site."

The sentence in question reads: "Dean has done other things to maximize his online fundraising punch, like...paying "bloggers" or professional Internet surfers to keep the enthusiasm up on his website."

I can see how people might have been confused. Yesterday.

(via mydd)

ZT, Monday:

On Dean’s campaign, we paid Markos and Jerome Armstrong as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean.