17 June, 2013

The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management -- New York Magazine

The World of Black-Ops Reputation Management -- New York Magazine:

Online, Phin’s financial journalism found a nice complement in philanthropy. My e-mail pinged with a press release issued when Charity News Forum named him “Philanthropist of the Month” in November. Another told me he was writing for something called Philanthropy Chronicle, an online charitable-­giving portal I had never heard of. What’s more, he was rekindling his passion for analytical philosophy, publishing a collection of essays from The ­Harvard Review of Philosophy, the undergraduate journal he once edited. And he was even combining philosophy with philanthropy, leading the small staff of the website PhilosophyBookReview.com to “bring philosophy writing to underprivileged youth by making it part of nonprofit educational programs in developing nations.”

But something was wrong with these sites, which in every case looked flimsy and temporary, especially when you got beyond the first page. Venture Cap Monthly listed a number of prominent writers as “authors,” including the Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell, Fast Company journalist Danielle Sacks, and Slate critic-at-large Stephen Metcalf. Caldwell and Sacks write about business, so I could imagine—­barely—that by contributing to an obscure site, they might be slumming for a paycheck. But I couldn’t make any sense of the presence of Metcalf, who had written a ­scintillating essay about the films of Tom Cruise, I remembered, but nothing that would interest a venture capitalist.