Quote Originally Posted by basschick
and as far as reviews go, being nice to me won't help at all. i call it like i see it, and i feel that if my friends wanted better reviews, they'd make better paysites

As a sidenote to this, I have actually begun to turn down offers to do reviews for a few magazines who told me, in no uncertain terms, that ALL reviews had to be positive to stroke the egos of their advertisers. Being in the publishing business is quite hard sometimes (as I'm sure you've found, basschick, if you've ever written for any magazines), b/cuz your conscious dictates that you should always be honest at all costs, yet practicality tells you that you need to "lie creatively" (i.e.: stroke someone) in order to keep a magazine in business.

It's even harder here at AVN, where we are a trade-based publication rather than a consumer-driven one. The majority of AVN's revenue comes from advertising, so that would seem to dictate that we must bow to our advertisers' every wish, right? (Trust me, some of you wouldn't believe the calls we get here, with porn directors and site owners threatening to pull all their advertising and ripping us new assholes as if the fact that they advertise with us entitles them to treat us like their servants. Personally, as I see it, they wouldn't even have a place to advertise if the magazine didn't exist in the first place, but that's a chicken-and-egg debate best left to another thread--and preferably one that I don't want to be a part of lest it gets me fired. LOL!)

Is it possible to retain journalistic integrity in such a scenario? Sometimes I honestly don't know. I mean, I've gotten the art of feature and entertainment writing down to a science, and I know the right key words and the right things to say to make people happy, but sometimes my heart is just not in it. Which is when you tell yourself, "OK, dude, this is your bread and butter, so shut up and do the job you're paid to do."

I guess the question this raises is: What do webmasters expect from a magazine they advertise in? Honesty, or simply bought publicity?