Update: Pepsi has reportedly been removed from Scienceblogs.
This internal email was reportedly just sent by Scienceblogs executive manager Adam Bly (Back story here). I'm still parsing through what it means and hope to have more soon, but on the surface I'm glad to see management has clearly heard the consternation and is making moves to address it.
Update: The scibloggers I've spoken with about this are cautiously optimistic about the changes. Several others have already announced publicly they're leaving (Updated list here), citing the Pepsi fiasco as one of a number of reasons. Hopefully, management has at least staunched the bleeding with this admittedly fairly quick action for the remainder.
Dear ScienceBloggers, Thank you for the feedback that you sent me today. We listened and I want to share with you the technical and design changes we are making immediately (in addition to the Conflict of Interest statement that will appear atop each post). Our goal is to make sponsored blogs 100% transparent to our readers and also give them the choice to read them or not.
1. We are introducing (already up) a distinct grey banner above the branded banner of the blog, with the word "ADVERTORIAL". We are taking best practices and guidelines from magazines and adapting them to the web. When you click on ADVERTORIAL you will be taken to a page that clearly spells out that this blog was paid for by the sponsor and our editorial policy concerning content on this blog. We are also working on possible subdomains for these blogs.
2. We are giving our readers the choice of opting out of the RSS feeds from sponsored blogs.
3. In the Combined Feed, we are making posts from sponsored blogs clearly marked as such. (We are working on design solutions to incorporate this philosophy into Last 24 Hours.)
4. We are removing sponsored blogs from SB's Google News feed. We should have adopted these practices two years ago when we launched the first sponsored blog.
Please continue to send me feedback directly -- it's very helpful. Thanks, Adam
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