Louis Gray Ponders Ethics. Again.

Mr. Gray won a free 3G iPhone from the folks at SocialMedian and two things are clear:

1. Louis really, really, really wants the phone (me too, and I absolutely don't need one, but still, me too)
2. Louis is struggling a little with propriety and ethics, but not so much that he’s not taking the phone

Although I predict Louis will regret giving up his Blackberry (assuming he sends more than a couple of few word e-mails per day), I think he handled this situation appropriately. He thought about it, but still took the phone. I think it is important to think about it, but, in this case, I also think it is OK to take the phone.

It’s good for journalists to be pure. But bloggers aren’t journalists. I admire the ethics of Walt Mossberg and his purity comes in handy since he’s making purchasing recommendations, often on items costing more than several hundred dollars. But still, even Walt lets Kara Swisher trash Yahoo week in, week out (day in, day out) when Kara’s wife is an executive at Google. Kara refers to that in her disclosure every time she writes about Google or its competitors, so there's no issue as far as disclosure. If even Walt and the WSJ draw the distinction that blogging is not journalism that’s plenty good enough for me.

While Louis is a great critical thinker, he seemingly aspires to never be critical simply for the sake of being critical. This puts him into a very, very small slice of the blogsphere. It’s a nice piece of the pie to carve out. I trust Louis to be honest about what he thinks and therefore don’t worry about the ethics issues where he’s concerned.

Louis was pretty honest about disclosing the one fact that probably was most important (for me) when assessing how much Louis currently values SocialMedian. He expressed some guilt over not having used the service much. I’m not sure if this was guilt at not using the service much or guilt over not using the service much and STILL winning the phone. But either way, the thing he disclosed that I thought very important was this: he isn’t using the service regularly. That says quite a lot really.

One of the hardest things about “reporting” anything is that inevitably you meet people, you like them and it’s all of the sudden difficult to write something about someone you’ve met and liked that might not wind up sounding so good. I ran into this problem more than a few times. The one thing I learned was that in the long run, the good people will not hold a grudge with you speaking your honest opinion and when someone does hold a grudge against you for doing that, it says more about them than it does about you.

Louis disclosed all he needed to disclose. While I don’t think having the iPhone will impair Louis’ ability to accurately portray his feelings about SocialMedian, in the short-term I think winning the phone will make Louis want to use the service more. But in the longer run if the service isn’t providing enough value to invest his time in on a regular basis, having the phone won’t change any of that. Either way, we at least have enough information to decide for ourselves whether we want to trust Louis’ opinion on the service or not. I find absolutely nothing improper about this.