Ethical Blogging
The Korean Internet community has been in scandalville following some news reports of bloggers giving positive reviews of products in exchange for gifts. Actually, it was well known in the community that they did that–and still do that. Way back I ate at a restaurant, and the chef knew I was a food blogger. He was surprised that I paid for my meal. He said that Korean food bloggers usually demanded free food for them and their parties and threatened them with bad reviews.
I was told, too, that it’s typical in Korea to inform a restaurant ahead of time that you’re reviewing it so they can prepare. This is a practice I still don’t do. In fact, I try to look like a typical backpacking slob when going to upscale places to see how the service reacts. A documentary is making waves right now, The TrueMat Show (a play on The Truman Show and the Korean word mat for “taste”), that exposes the practice of restaurants paying the big TV networks to feature them in their food review shows. They’re not really review shows. They’re cartoonish “let’s drool over this” programs that have the production values of children’s TV.
Back to ZenKimchi, we were always ahead of the curve in this department. In fact, I think we were the first blog in Korea to post a code of ethics. I had a good sense of journalistic ethics, even when this blog was meant for friends and family. It frustrated me that blogs did and still do blur the lines between objectivity and paid endorsement, shooting past us in popularity. But I always kept us on the straight and narrow. Sometimes restaurants have given us free meals, but I’ve always stated that when I wrote about them. And the restaurants all knew from the start that I was going to be honest. What’s great is that honesty was what they wanted. They wanted a little criticism to help them improve their game.
The only deal we have right now with a company is with Samsung. They gave me a little HD video camera to shoot some food videos. I actually don’t even endorse the camera on this site, but I post that the camera was given to me by the company.
So, note that ZenKimchi has always had a code of ethics from the start, even if it was unwritten at first. We never accept gifts for positive reviews, even though we are open to accepting gifts. When we do accept gifts, we mention that in the blog post. We are also a registered business in Korea and report our income to the tax office.
Ya got clean bloggin’ with ZenKimchi :)
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