Treating Journalists as Publishers
An article at Huffington Post discusses the problems inherent in news organizations paying journalists to blog based on the traffic they recieve. From the article:
To treat journalists like mini-publishers is a slippery slope. For all of blogging's editorial opportunities -- the freedom to innovate or the chance to collapse the normally endless magazine response to timely issues -- the journalists are no longer simply doing their job.The whole thing is worth a read.
When the mission is tied -- directly, through the incentive of increased financial compensation -- to maximizing traffic, the blogger is as much a marketer as they are a journalist.
