Wal-Mart take overs: first the Interweb, then the world

Heather Armstrong is using blog ads to feed her family. Neil Kramer weighed the ethics of accepting a Sprint cell phone on the condition he writes about it on his blog. Ist readers need only look on the left and right sidebars to realize bloggers are looking for ways to wrangle the fruits of their labor into cold, hard capital.

Then why, as The New York Times is reporting, are some bloggers participating in the Wal-Mart P.R. campaign to improve the megastore's image without any return?

Wal-Mart, which has been scrutinized recently for controversial company policies, doesn't pay Internet writers who plug their press releases, sometimes verbatim, in their blogs. Benefits for bloggers are slim. Besides inviting bloggers to the company's corporate headquarters in Bentonville, the writers see no other compensation for disseminating good news about Wal-Mart on the Web.

Wal-Mart, long criticized for low wages and its health benefits, began working with bloggers in late 2005 "as part of our overall effort to tell our story," said Mona Williams, a company spokeswoman.

"As more and more Americans go to the Internet to get information from varied, credible, trusted sources, Wal-Mart is committed to participating in that online conversation," she said.

[...]

In the messages, Wal-Mart promotes positive news about itself, like the high number of job applications it received at a new store in Illinois, and criticizes opponents, noting for example that a rival, Target, raised "zero" money for the Salvation Army in 2005, because it banned red-kettle collectors from stores.

Houstonist would like to know readers' opinions about what Wal-Mart is doing. Should large corporations use independent bloggers to plug their stores? Would the situation be better or worse if Wal-Mart were paying bloggers? Do bloggers have the obligation to be objective when reporting news?

That said, Houstonist thinks Wal-Mart is excellent and has the lowest prices. They ... uhhhh ... aren't telling us to say that.