It’s probably not coincidence that Bambi Francisco has resigned her position at MarketWatch to pursue her new start-up Vator.tv. After CNET’s expose, and what I feel was an attempt to embarrass a competitor, Dow Jones and Francisco probably realized the suggested conflicts of interest didn’t look good for either of them, despite her getting pre-approval.
We wish her the best of luck!

I’d like to hear your thoughts on CNET’s look at whether journalists are starting to break the informal code that prevents conflicts of interest.
Their expose of well known MarketWatch journalist, Bambi Francisco, reads as more of an attempt to undermine a rival publication, than a serious look at whether traditional journalists should avoid getting involved with companies they write about.
Here’s the summary CNET uses to descri

War Games, as it turns out, is more than just an early Matthew Broderick movie. They’re a series of events involving prominent business schools, including Harvard, MIT and the London Business School. In the past, these war games have accurately predicted events like the AOL/Google search deal, “the game of digital entertainment supremacy last year, which was iPod versus News Corp. versus Microsoft versus Vodafone or Verizon, that Ap

If we’re to believe the tripe fed to us by CNET recently, we’d have to add the New York Times to the list of “spammers” and “scammers” out to game Digg. Why?
TechCrunch reports that the NYT has added social bookmark links to many of its stories, including links to Digg, Facebook and Newsvine

I’m normally a fan of Elinor Mills stuff on CNET, but her story about the manipulation of Digg is just wrong, wrong and wrong.
The article basically discusses how marketers are using Digg to promote their company. This social media marketing is no different to search engine marketing, and those that try to get stories on the front page of Digg still need to provide quality content, or the community will bury it.
It’s not a scam or spam, yet Elinor refers to the practice in the same way SEO used to be discussed, a few years back