On the upside, I can start out in this economy without having to compare it to the affluent way things used to be. While I hate I missed out on the affluent times, I’d also be frustrated if I’d had to “downshift”. For someone with the frustration tolerance of an Egyptian war god (such as myself), I suppose that’s not too bad a trade-off!

This post–and 99 percent of the replies–is wrong (and not in the sense of ‘incorrect’) at so many levels …

What a sad place the world has become. And what a waste we’ve made of the Internet.

It’s not the question, but more how they are asked. Also, in many cases, these are publicists I’ve worked with many times in the past.

I don’t own a horse and I’m not on my high horse.

This is base on my experience and my desire to know if other bloggers where dealing with the same situation as I am.

” “what angle this feature will take”? Maybe you’re bashing some touted ingredient, publicists need to expect honesty but also that their product will be cast in a reasonably good light otherwise why participate?” – dear friend I’ve been writing for long enough (I have 3 books that I’ve self published) and I can assure you there are many ways of respectively expose your views about a product that didn’t work for you.

We do it all the time on the site when a product didn’t work for us and we open the floor to readers to see if anyone agrees with us or not.

I hope thins answers your questions.

Coming from that perspective, I think the following:

PR agencies are doing their jobs when they check creds for media and bloggers — which I think should both be treated with the same amount of professionalism, scrutiny and respect. As a PR person, I always targeted my pitches to specific media that were my clients’ targets; we didn’t pitch to everybody, only the media we wanted to write about our clients.

True, PR is NOT the same and should not be confused with publicity. However, all publicity isn’t necessarily inferior to PR; likewise all PR is not necessarily superior to publicity. You just can’t generalize because there are those who lack ethics in both courts; there are also both PR pros and publicists that should be held in the highest regard.

I really don’t have a problem with the FTC stepping in to monitor bloggers writing to ensure that they fully disclose how the products they review are acquired and if payment was involved. In fact, I am a member of BlogwithIntegrity.com which was set up before the FTC action, and always disclose exactly where the products I write about have come from.

It does cost money and time for a PR agency to run a blogger outreach campaign on behalf of a client — that’s why the client pays the PR agency to represent them plus reimburse the agency for expenses related to that effort. But this PR agency needs to realize that product reviews are just that — an opportunity for a writer to try out a product and write his/her subjective opinion about it in the media (blog or traditional outlets). Therefore, samples are essential for anyone who is asked to do a review — bloggers or traditional media. Also remember, that just because a product is submitted for review, doesn’t mean that the media outlet is required to write about it. That’s the difference between believable product reviews and paid endorsements or advertisements.

Lastly, now that I am a mommy blogger, I’d be remiss not to note here that most mommy bloggers I know (including some very successful ones) HAVE day jobs, in addition to blogging. And they are not producing much of an income directly from the blog, but from having sponsors or pay-per-click ads on their site. These mommy bloggers might work for an employer or they might do occasional consulting such as I do, but the ethical ones are not blogging about anything that is ever a conflict of interest.

For certain, ALL media: blogs, traditional media and others need to act professionally all the time.

I’ve turned down samples when I felt that the rep on the other side of the equation wanted more control than I was comfortable giving, but for the most part they’ve been pretty good about me saying, “I’ll review the product honestly and would appreciate it if I could use you or one of your contacts to get some additional information before writing the review.”

For me the “pushy” factor is much bigger with getting spammed into oblivion with press releases and the electronic equivalent of glossies with no real meat to them, or reps sending me inquiries about reviews in which they claim to be long-time readers of my blog and then demonstrate that I’m just someone on a list. I don’t need to feel special, but I don’t appreciate the farce.

I think the market is just in flux. Bloggers and marketers are both trying to figure out how things work. It’s not an easy process.

I’ve also had to deal with a few of those “pushy” PR people who seem to want me to repost their every press release. I can’t do that, of course. Maybe one of ten, though, will be interesting enough (to my readers) for me to do a story, though, so I don’t really discourage it either.

I also think that a few years ago, no one really understand how to measure the value of these online placements, so never asked about unique visitors, etc. Budgets were big enough that samples were abundant, and clients never asked about the stats because they also weren’t blog/internet savvy. But I also think clients never really valued online placements either, until recently – my clients rarely did. So in a way, I view this as a sign that companies are taking these online reviews seriously – as seriously as print coverage, and that’s a good thing. It may be annoying to answer all the time, but I think its a sign of legitimacy that people are asking.