A lot of the complaints that real journalists have about blogs is that they don’t adhere to the same ethics and standards as real journalistic endeavors do, or real reporters.

This is just another one of those things that proves them right :/ It makes bloggers in general look bad in my opinion.

No worries, folks! Now, the mainstream media is joining in—the Wall Street Journal has a new anti-embargo policy for its editorial staff. Rather, like TechCrunch, they’ll accept exclusives, and honor embargoes when the story is big enough.

I have to assume that means the WSJ will agree to embargoes only when they’re the only one getting the story or that the story is too good to pass up for some silly little policy. And even then, it almost sounds like they would prefer you to query with the story’s hook and the embargo terms for them to choose.

Unlike TechCrunch, the WSJ is NOT saying that they will agree to an embargo and go back on their word as a policy. Instead, paidContent reports, WSJ reporters are encouraged to . . . you know, do actual research. While expensive in an industry that’s struggling to adapt, in some respects, this could actually be good for the WSJ and MSM at large. PC explains:

In general, WSJ reporters will no longer be part of a herd of journalist briefings, which results in a spate of stories from various outlets all at the same time. If PR professionals approach them on a story, then they can refuse and go around and hunt down the story if they want to.

paidContent also looked at the policy in action: recently with the Yahoo homepage relaunch story, both Jessica Vascellaro and Kara Swisher went around the embargo by talking directly to sources—though, as PC points out, they did so with varying degrees of success/credibility/violating the embargo. As I said in December, “the practice of sending a full release with the headline ‘embargoed until such-and-such EST on such-and-such’ is taking your life in your hands.”

What do you think? Does talking to independent sources after learning about a story through an embargoed release and going live early violate an embargo? Will the WSJ’s new policy affect other MSM outlets? Is this the death of the embargo?

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WSJ Connect is still in the planning/conceptual stages, says one source, but there is “strong interest” to move the project forward. Importantly, it would leverage the WSJ brand but would be a separate property and unencumbered by the need for a paid subscription to the newspaper.

In the planning stages with a strong interest could be applied to the idea of just about anything in any company. That being said, the supposed “LinkedIn Killer” would be a replacement for the WSJ Community which is part of the current WSJ site. I am a fairly regular reader of the Wall Street Journal and I am a site subscriber. Those two pieces of data make the fact that I didn’t even know that the current WSJ Community even existed pretty poignant. Now that I have gone to the site to look for it specifically, I see the link but I must have developed “community blindness” or something like it.

News Corp., as a whole, is not known for their ability to capitalize on the social media space. They own MySpace and we all know how that has flourished under its guidance. They do own a company called Slingshot Labs which will be tasked with building this WSJ Connect product if it indeed does see the light of day so they will not develop this in house as they did with the WSJ Community effort.

So rather than wonder what might happen based on ex-MySpace employees seeking some mention on TechCrunch, let’s ask a few questions of you, the MP reader. Would there be any interest in this type of community for you personally? If this idea actually came to fruition and was launched, who would you see as the demographic? What can a social networking community do to set it itself apart and possibly lure away some of the 15 million visitors that LinkedIn gets monthly? Is there room for more “straight business” social communities?

These are the kinds of questions that News Corp. and the WSJ need to ask themselves before they fully commit. It will be somewhat interesting to see if there is truly an attempt made to get this type of offering off the ground. I have been told that regardless how crowded a market or an industry is there is always room for one more GOOD player. What it truly takes to be good in the social media space, however, may be a barrier to entry that few can overcome at this point in time.

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