Tuvel Communications Blog: WSJ: Dean Campaign Made Payments To Two Bloggers

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January 17, 2005

WSJ: Dean Campaign Made Payments To Two Bloggers

More on the recent WSJ article about the Dean campaign paying bloggers to write good things:

* excerpts from the article

* from Kos:

Sat Jan 15th, 2005 at 15:46:59 PST

For those of you unable to listen to the podcast of this interview here's a transcript I typed up due to the fact that I have entirely too much time on my hands.

* Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post on Zephyr Teachout's recent post that seems to be stirring this pot.

* Laura Gross, who spoke to the WSJ, had this to say about the story:

I know many of you have questions so I wanted to give you the full story. I am sorry I have not responded sooner, I have been traveling all day with Gov. Dean and I'm in St. Louis now. Thank you for your messages and e-mails . . . here's the full story:

So I got a call Thursday from the Jeanne Cummings, The Wall Street Journal reporter who covered the Dean campaign. By all accounts, she did a fine job -- covered all aspects of the campaign, even met the Web team and wrote a long story on their work. She was calling, she said, on behalf of some of her paper's reporters in Boston who were looking into a story about the campaign and the blogs.

She said she thought she knew what was going on, and we talked "on background" so she could "just clear things up once and for all" -- that is, not for attribution. By the end of the conversation she had confirmed what she thought -- that there was no news, that this was what she called a "dead story" -- and said that she didn't think there would be any article at all, much less one that mentioned Dean. She said that if for some reason she needed a quote she'd call me back.

Next thing I know there appears in the WSJ an article so sloppy and so inaccurate that I spent the morning trying to track Jeanne down to find out what happened. She called me back at 10:30 a.m. -- and actually apologized for the article (written by two colleagues). She said that she wouldn�t work with those reporters in the same capacity again, would only give them on-the-record quotes and assured me that she had notified her editors.