Small online guys squeezed by the not-so-jolly giants

WE'VE POINTED OUT before the kind of pressures that young hacks or would-be hacks are subject to when faced with the might of a large corporation and its team of dedicated and highly paid spinners.

Lest you forget, read this Gutterwatch story, headed "Games journalists unethical and lack integrity".

A story on AMD MB today underlines and explores the kind of pressures that online web sites face. As Ryan Shrout points out, many fledgling sites are tempted by the Satans to promote products just so they can get a sample product to review, which often comes with other "conditions" like running banners for a firm or persuasion, subtle or otherwise, to run a positive review.

Obviously not good for readers, who may and often do know nothing about these backroom pressures put on web sites.

Not that it didn't happen when the IT press was dominated by the non-Internet print publishers of course. In some ways it was worse. Big corporation often talked to big corporation and journalism and journalists could easily find themselves crushed.

Ryan Shrout at AMD MB said that he discovered an example of the way web sites and vendors can connive this weekend, when he claims he was told by an AMD spinner that he couldn't enter a LAN event because Tom's Hardware had asked that other online press couldn't enter the event.

But, he claims, other vendors including Nvidia and the organisers had not heard of such a blockade. The would-be blockade was not, he claims, sanctioned by Tom's HWG management, but between a local representative of the mag and AMD.

But why? It's a dirty little business down here in online land...

You can read more here. µ