Business 2.0 blogs won't jeopardize journalist integrity

Josh Quittner, editor of Business 2.0, stated in a radio interview for the show “On the Media” that he doesn’t believe that the decision to pay the magazine’s reporters based on how many hits their blogs receive will hurt their ethics.

In an interview with Bob Garfield, Quittner stated, “If my writers start to write about things that are off topic, that are of no interest to a business readership, people won’t come back. The Web is a very self-correcting place. And, don’t forget, I still function as an editor here, and part of the deal with my people is I’m reading everything that gets posted.”

Quittner also stated, “The beauty of this new medium is my guys don’t know who’s advertising on their pages. I don’t know who’s advertising on their pages. I doubt if anyone at CNN Money, which is the overall website that will be hosting us, knows who specifically is advertising on any single blog. It’s utterly pure. It’s utterly innocent. We all are in the business of serving a reading public, and it makes no sense to put together media that isn’t interesting to people.”

Read the transcript of the interview here.