The relationship between a reporter and a company he (or she) is trying to write about is… well, complicated. In some cases, it’s like two hostile nations trying to meet at Camp David, with each side compiling as much information — secret and otherwise — about their adversary, and each side trying to read between the lines to find out what the other party really meant. And sometimes those files get leaked, as they did in the case of Wired writer Fred Vogelstein.

In a classic case of mis-communication, Fred got sent the file that Microsoft PR firm Waggener Edstrom had compiled on him. The PDF, which Fred has helpfully made available here, contains 13 pages of notes from interviews, commentary about his reporting abilities, and so on. Nothing earth-shattering, mind you, but still somewhat embarrassing — including comments such as “It takes him a bit to get his point across so try to be patient” and “We’re pushing Fred to finish reporting and start writing.” Ironically, the story was part of a Wired cover package on transparency, as editor Chris Anderson describes here.

As Mike Arrington notes at TechCrunch, the fact that Microsoft’s PR firm compiled a dossier on Fred is not surprising. Somewhere, there is an underground server farm the size of the Pentagon filled with minutiae about anyone who has made it past the Microsoft reception desk (I’m only partly joking). That’s how Microsoft — and many other large companies — work.

Frank Shaw, president of Waggener Edstrom — whose blog, fittingly enough, is called “Glass House” — has responded with a post about the event. For the most part, he plays it cool, although he seems (perhaps not surprisingly) a little on the defensive at certain points. Towards the end, he says that in most cases “the interests of a journalist and PR are totally aligned – a great interview is always the best possible outcome.”

Mr. Shaw is right, of course. But what he doesn’t say is that the definition of what constitutes a “good” interview can differ radically depending on whether you are a PR firm or a reporter trying to get a story. Sometimes that relationship is a pitched battle, sometimes it’s an arranged marriage, and sometimes it’s a dance. A PR firm has to be equal parts marriage broker, dating service, DJ and (in some cases) spook. ‘Twas always thus.

If anybody is in a position to help Wired magazine think about new media and the “long tail” theory, it’s the magazine’s editor Chris Anderson, who just finished publishing a book called The Long Tail. Chris, who has obviously thought a lot about these kinds of issues, has a great two-part post up about how he wants to change Wired magazine’s website, now that the print magazine and the web service are once again part of the same company.

The first part is an overview of how the media landscape has changed, and how people’s expectations have changed, structured in a “then and now” format, including:

THEN: Bookmarks and habit drive traffic to the home page; site architecture and editorial hierarchy determines where readers goes next. Portals rule.

NOW: Search and blog links drive readers to individual stories; they leave as quickly as they come. “De-portalization” rules.

and

THEN: Media as Lecture: we create content, you read it.

NOW: Media as Conversation: a total blur between traditional journalism, blogging and user comment/contributions.

And the second part of the post deals with how to change a magazine and a website to better reflect some of those changes in attitude. Chris deals with six things that he says a truly “transparent” and interactive media organization would do — and the possible benefits and downsides of those approaches — including:

Show who we are. All staff edit their own personal “about” pages, giving bios, contact details and job functions. Encourage anyone who wants to blog to do so. Have a masthead that actually means something to people who aren’t on it.

and

Privilege the crowd. Why not give comments equal status to the story they’re commenting on? Why not publish all letters to the editor as they’re submitted (we did that here), and let the readers vote on which are the best? We could promise to publish the top five each month, whether we like them or not.

and

Let readers decide what’s best. We own Reddit, which (among other things) is a terrific way of measuring popularity. Why should we guess at which stories will be most popular and give those preferential treatment? Why not just measure what people really think and let statistics determine the hierarchy of the front page?

Well worth a read for anyone interested in the future of online media. Some things Anderson says he’s not sure will work (wikis for stories, for example, which Wired has experimented with) but thinks should probably be tried anyway. I wish more editors would think about that kind of thing. There’s more commentary about the piece at Rex Hammock’s blog, at Publishing 2.0 and over at the Bivings Report. And if you’re looking for a laugh, check out Gawker’s version.

Update:

Josh Quittner, editor of Business 2.0 magazine — who recently asked all of his writers to start blogging (and who I’m pretty sure used to write for Wired) — has posted a bit of a rebuttal to Chris’s piece, in which he says that publishers of print magazines are going to have to decide which is more important, online or print, because telegraphing what your cover story is going to be doesn’t really work for print mags. Thanks to Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 for pointing to Josh’s post, and for writing one of his own.

My blogging friend Tony Hung pointed me towards a new wrinkle in the ongoing saga of Edelman and Wal-Mart: a story in MediaPost describes how the PR company has essentially come out of the closet on its involvement with two other Wal-Mart blogs — the Working Families for Wal-Mart blog and the PaidCritics blog.

Rather than being anonymous, as they were before, posts on both blogs are now credited to individuals, whose names (first names only) are hyperlinked to bios that clearly say they work for Edelman. There is no mention of who Edelman is, however, or that the PR firm represents Wal-Mart, and there is no link to the Edelman website — and on the “About Us” page there is no mention that Edelman was involved in creating either site, or that both are financed by Wal-Mart.

Of course, as more than one commenter has pointed out, pretty much anyone with a functioning brainstem would assume that anything called Working Families for Wal-Mart was obviously being paid for by Wal-Mart, and that any site trying to out and/or bash critics of Wal-Mart was also a paid shill. Which in raises the question that the MediaPost article gets into near the end, and that Tony also mentions:

If you’re being totally transparent, doesn’t that kind of defeat the whole purpose of having such a blog? Feel free to let fly in my comments. BL Ochman says Edelman should be thrown out of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, and Shel Holtz says he thinks even the disclosure of ties doesn’t make the blogs any better. Freelance copywriter Carson has some thoughts here.

Update:

Steve Rubel says Edelman is listening to all comments and wants to do better, and Richard Edelman outlines some of the ways the firm is trying to do that. And Suw Charman has an excellent post on the topic at her Corante blog — she says the Wal-Mart blogs show that “too many people at Edelman think the old school way, about control and being on-message and spin” (Richard Edelman has posted a comment there in which he disagrees with her). My friend Rob Hyndman also has some thoughts about the “atomization of media” that are worth a read.