Rules and Regulation to Command and Obey

The Food Blog Code of Ethics has been getting some press around the Intarwebs over the past week or so. Created by two bloggers in California, the code lays out rules and regulations that bloggers should abide by when creating blog posts. It also includes a separate guideline for reviewing restaurants. This code, and a subsequent late-to-the-game code from the creators of eGullet have been hotly debated in the professional blogosphere (ie. sites such as the Guardian’s Word of Mouth) but I’ve seen little mention of it on any of the personal food blogs that I follow.

The basis of the code is the following 5 points:

We will be accountable
We will be civil
We will reveal bias
We will disclose gifts, comps and samples
We will follow the rules of good journalism

In my time editing TasteTO, we have hired a number of bloggers to write for us. We like having a variety of voices and points of view, and hiring bloggers allows us to do that effectively. However – and this is a big one – bloggers are not journalists. And as such, are usually not aware of the rules of journalism. Expecting someone who has started a blog as a hobby to  research the basic rules of journalism is probably expecting too much effort from someone who just wants to write about what they had for dinner. Especially when the rules as outlined are not followed by professional journalists themselves.

For instance, disclosure. Personally, I don’t believe it’s necessary for bloggers to reveal that they’ve received an item as a gift, comp or sample. That doesn’t happen in the real world of lifestyle journalism – people don’t really think women’s magazines pay for all the items they recommend people buy every month, do they? All those products for food spreads, cosmetics articles… even clothing sometimes, although expensive items are usually (hopefully) loaned with the expectation of them being returned – those are all comped to the publication with the hope that they will be mentioned. You don’t see little disclaimers all over Chatelaine or Canadian Living indicating that the cookies on page 43 and the cutlery on page 72 were comped. So if we want bloggers to behave like professional journalists, why would we have a separate set of rules for them?

The section of the code related to reviewing restaurants is based on the guidelines from the Association of Food Journalists, a US organization for food writers in that country. Except that the majority of amateur bloggers tend to be recipe bloggers and don’t really do much in terms of restaurant reviews in the first place – at least that’s the case with the many Toronto-based blogs that I follow.

Neither the eGullet rules or the Food Blog Code of Ethics seem to consider recipe bloggers at all, which is too bad because a section clearly outlining recipe copyright laws would have been more helpful than info on terms of service or insisting that bloggers reviewing a restaurant go on multiple visits before posting a review. I see a lot more people violating copyright than I do unfairly slamming a restaurant after only one visit.

My concern with having what is supposed to be an internet-wide code of ethics is that there are millions of food bloggers out there. Not all of them are going to give a shit – especially if they’re blogging for fun. Lists of rules and regulations suck the fun out of stuff very quickly, and already, the comments on the Guardian piece are mostly of the mind that such a code is pompous and condescending.

We have a very detailed guideline for our writers at TasteTO, with a separate guideline specifically on how to write restaurant reviews (which might even be more stringent than the AFJ) – but – we also aspire to be taken seriously as a professional media outlet. I don’t even like calling TasteTO a “blog” because blogging to me has always had an amateur feel to it.  (This site, this is a blog…) In part, that’s what makes it fun. If bloggers who want to share recipes, talk about a new product they found, or write a quick review of a meal they had at a local restaurant suddenly have to meet some special list of rules, we may well see the whole medium disappearing.

Tim Hayward of the Word of Mouth blog at the Guardian puts it succinctly; “be entertaining and informative or people won’t bother to read you”. For the average blogger, this should be enough. I’d rather see bloggers put more effort into writing well than making sure they obey all the rules.