The Daily Green: Why An E-Commerce Blog?

Rolling out Version 2.0 of Green For Good, we're trying something new in online journalism.

We want to build a culture of news, education and community around an e-commerce site. In so doing, we hope to contribute to new paradigms in journalism, marketing and advertising.

We represent a marked departure from the typical approach of e-commerce, which is simply to offer products and product descriptions. At Amazon and eBay and a million other e-commerce sites you'll find huge product diversity and brilliant transaction technologies. What you won't find is a lot of information or conversation about the stuff for sale. (There are "customer reviews" of course, but their credibility and authority is often and widely suspect.)

There are logical reasons for this. Since the early days of Web ordering, the assumption has been that shoppers know what they want before coming to the site. They've done their shopping and research in stores or via search engines and found the deal they want. Their primary reason for visiting the site is simply to place an order.

At Green For Good, we're committed to high-quality, low-impact, sustainable, ecologically healthy products. But we also want our clients and customers to share our rationale, philosophy and values. We want to build an ethos around our particular brand of e-commerce.

So that's the reason for this blog. And for our new forum, The Green Room, our Product Reviews section, our Ask the Experts features, our monthly newsletter and our newsfeeds from a variety of sources.

We call all this the Green Scene. As much as we want to help inform and inspire our customers, we also feel our customers can help inform and inspire us — and one another at the same time. And best of all worlds, we can be a "green" resource ourselves to the Web community at large.

As a lifelong journalist, I'm intrigued and excited by the possibilities here. The Web offers journalists the tools to do incredible things far beyond what the print world can provide. There are manifold reasons why a daily newspaper about "Green" is impractical: Audience identification, distribution, production costs. The Web, with its infinite reach and real-time magic, makes a "Daily Green" not only possible but necessary.

From the standpoint of Journalism Theory 101, one might ask, "Aren't you risking objectivity by writing about stuff that you sell products for?" This is a significant point, called separation of church and state in the traditional journalism argot. The idea is that the reporting side doesn't know what the advertising side is doing, and vice versa, to preserve an ideological purity to the news.

Again, the Web changes the dynamic. A Web site can afford to assume it exists for "like minds." Its audience is there not because it has to subscribe to 100 pages to get the 3 stories it might actually be interested in, but precisely because it knows it will find material it identifies with on the site. Additionally, the products are part and parcel of the "like minds" culture.

In the case of Green For Good, we assume our visitors want to know about green lifestyle. We assume they support green values. They want to know how to minimize their footprint on earth and make the future safe for their children. So in order to serve our readers best, we're not going to spend a lot of time questioning green principles, global warming, climate disruption and sustainability. Rather we'll try to show the subtle discriminatory practices against "green" ideals, and how monied interests work the channels to discredit green values and promote principles and practices that spell the end of the world as we know it. And we'll also celebrate "green's" virtues, its success stories, and the strides it is making in giving hope for the planet's future.

So we're glad to have you aboard. As always, feel free to email me or add comments below. Thanks for coming, and feel free to bookmark us and subscribe to our RSS feed (see right column), our newsletter and The Green Room.

— Paul Andrews, Green For Good