Joel On Software on The Ethics of Samples

There's a bit of a debate in the technology blogosphere. Evidently, Microsoft sent free PCs, preloaded with Vista, to prominent bloggers. No strings attached. Robert Scoble, a notable technology blogger, says that as long as the blogger comes clean about the gift, there's no problem.

Joel Spolsky disagrees and echoes my own uneasiness about samples and gifts. I try to be very honest with my OWF readers when I've gotten something as a sample or gift—I consider them different only at a euphemistic level—and I'm very clear with PR people that I a) don't promise a review and b) don't promise to not write a bad review, as some other bloggers do. Anyone looking at my list of book reviews could see that I'm happy to publish bad reviews.

When it comes to samples of wine and books, there's a part of me that accepts this as a normal part of the business. Another part of me says that the ubiquity of samples doesn't prevent them from being problematic. They allow writers to praise wines no one will ever be able to buy; there's a whole issue of "for press" bottles from top vineyards or better blends; and they allow writers to ignore cost when their readers can't. As I always say, if Robert Parker had a fixed annual budget for wine, I'll bet the inflated pricing model for CA wines would collapse so that wineries could get their wares in front of The Great Schnozz.

When is something a sample, and when is it a gift? One winery sent me two identical bottles for review. I assume this was to cover the potential of a corked bottle, but isn't it really a gift? Cork taint isn't such a huge problem that the winery needs to send two bottles of the same wine to every reviewer. But if I sent it back, I'd be doing so at my own cost.

I also try to only take samples that I think will be useful to my readers. I accepted an expensive piece of grass-fed steak, because I wanted to sample different grass-fed beefs and see if they really had the "sense of place" that advertisers claim as a benefit. I thought that would be useful. On the other hand, I turned down a free fresh foie gras because it would have been from Hudson Valley, and I've sampled their foie gras plenty of times, so there's nothing new for me to say to my readers. I wrote the company back and explained that if I took the foie gras, I'd be doing so only to get free foie gras, not to educate my readers.