Update: As I was putting up this post, Adam Bly, CEO of ScienceBlogs, announced that he was removing Food Frontiers from the site. The corporate blogs by Invitrogen, Shell Oil, and General Electric are still there, although only General Electric’s appears to be active.

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Responding to the blow-up that followed the decision by ScienceBlogs to give Pepsi a blog to tout its products, CEO Adam Bly first tried to defend the decision, and then, later yesterday, decided to make some changes, in an email to his bloggers that was given to the Tracker.

After I’d criticized him here, I thought it was fair to post his response.

The email, in full:

Dear ScienceBloggers,

Thank you for the feedback that you sent me today. We listened and I want to share with you the technical and design changes we are making immediately (in addition to the Conflict of Interest statement that will appear atop each post). Our goal is to make sponsored blogs 100% transparent to our readers and also give them the choice to read them or not.

1. We are introducing (already up) a distinct grey banner above the branded banner of the blog, with the word “ADVERTORIAL”. We are taking best practices and guidelines from magazines and adapting them to the web. When you click on ADVERTORIAL you will be taken to a page that clearly spells out that this blog was paid for by the sponsor and our editorial policy concerning content on this blog. We are also working on possible subdomains for these blogs.

2. We are giving our readers the choice of opting out of the RSS feeds from sponsored blogs.

3. In the Combined Feed, we are making posts from sponsored blogs clearly marked as such. (We are working on design solutions to incorporate this philosophy into Last 24 Hours.)

4. We are removing sponsored blogs from SB’s Google News feed.

We should have adopted these practices two years ago when we launched the first sponsored blog. Please continue to send me feedback directly (I’m not in the Back Room) — it’s very helpful.

Thanks,

Adam

Take a look at Pepsi’s Food Frontiers on ScienceBlogs now. “Advertorial” is by far the least prominent word on the page, in white letters against a pale gray background, and in small type. And contrary to what Bly says, clicking on “Advertorial” does NOT take readers to page that spells out how the blog was paid for, but simply back to the blog’s home page.

You can play with your feeds all you like, ScienceBlogs; you haven’t fixed the problem.

- Paul Raeburn

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