Digg probe hits a nerve

The latest brouhaha to enrage bloggers involves a bit of investigative journalism.

A reporter at Wired looking into accounts of fraud at Digg decided to test them out, and paid people to recommend a blog posting.

The article drew a lot of attention, but many bloggers focused on a possible conflict of interest. Wired News is owned by Conde Nast, which also owns Digg competitor Reddit. Although the article disclosed the relationship, some are arguing that because of the connection, the piece was out of bounds.

Is Wired allowed to investigate Digg? Or do corporate conflicts make such stories off-limits?

Blog community response:

"Digg can't treat Wired like any other user that's engaged in fraud. Wired is the press, and the press has tremendous power. Wired is putting Digg in an impossible situation, and they should be called on it. Reporting news is one thing (although they should note the conflict of interest there as well), but actively creating negative news about a competitor and then using the massive reach of Wired to promote that 'news' is way over the line."
--TechCrunch

"While I think that this doesn't mean that Wired should never write anything about (or even against) Digg, what they're doing now can only be described as an open campaign against their competitor."
--Frantic Industries

"I would compare the story written by Annalee Newitz (a freelance writer who used to be a policy analyst with the Electronic Freedom Foundation, according to the bio on her blog) with the kind of 'sting' that newspapers write when they sneak knives aboard a plane to show how lax security is. The only difference, of course, is that in most of those cases, the newspaper's parent company doesn't own a competing airline."
--Mathew Ingram