Breaking the Belkin Scandal: Blogger Schools Old-School Journalists
Arlen Parsa is about to get his degree in documentary film from Chicago's Columbia College. Yet he seems to have already graduated cum laude from the unofficial School of Blogs.
Thanks to his mashup of old-school reporting and new media-fueled advocacy, a major consumer electronics company is reeling from scandal, traditional media is following his news trail and anyone who ever had doubts about the validity of Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) customer reviews is having their worst suspicions confirmed.
"Politically speaking, I'm a progressive, so I think consumer advocacy comes naturally," Parsa told me.
It's quite possible that the executives at Belkin are wishing he'd stuck to politics.
The 21-year-old first broke the story last Friday on his blog, The Daily Background, which normally is Parsa's megaphone for thoughts and analysis on America's political landscape. But there was Parsa reporting that an employee of Belkin -- a maker of routers, cables and various iPod accessories (their brand is fairly ubiquitous in any Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) store) -- had advertised on Amazon's Mechanical Turk freelance jobs board service for people to review his company's products on Amazon and other Web sites.
