This post is about one of the round table discussions from VinoCamp Languedoc in March 2011.  I hesitate to label it as “wine blogger ethics” since that’s a big subject.  Miss Glouglou proposed and led the roundtable topic, and she had a more specific idea about what we’d discuss.  We set out to address the “transmission of information” which sort of bundles up a lot of subjects:

• Marketing material vs. reference material
• Credibility
• Bribery
• Are blogs any different than traditional media?

A lot of people felt strongly that there were deontological moral issues at stake specific to bloggers while other people focused much more on pragmatic issues (credibility, sales, etc.)

My favorite bit is in part 2 around 1:36 where we start talking about giving journalists free bottles of wine.  Some very earnest revelations.  (FYI: the off screen voice that admits it’s normal wine writers get wine is a professional wine writer.)

There’s also this question about whether bloggers can get into trouble by denouncing or even accidentally insulting people.  In retrospect, we could have talked about my extreme positivity on Love That Languedoc. But we talk so much about my website all day, I’m glad there was a session where it came up less.

There’s this idea that keeps coming up about federating talented bloggers into an edited source of information to rival conventional press.  It might be tangentially related to the topic just because bloggers wouldn’t need to face unique ethical issues if they operated more like a print magazine.  But then there’s also this issue of “why copy print media when it’s on its way downhill?”  They might have the ethics figured out, but if you have questions about monetization, there might be better industries to consult.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll continue to think about this and maybe post more later. For now here are the videos for people who weren’t able to attend.

Beautiful moments (that only come after wine-fueled lunch)

• French produce wine to be criticized by Americans and sold by the English and bought by the Chinese
• Traditional press is Tripoli; bloggers are Bengazi
• Freedom of speech, freedom of regret