Posted on 11/23/2005 5:38:49 PM PST by impatient
Back to the nebulous tech hype that Register readers love to hate.
The New York Times appears to have breached three of its own ethics guidelines when it gave op-ed space to John Battelle last week to promote the Web 2.0 buzzword.
Battelle, who produced the Web 2.0 conference with MediaLive, used the space to assure us that Web 2.0 wasn't really a bubble, in a curiously nervous and defensive piece.
But the Times failed to disclose that it's an investor in Battelle's new Federated Media publishing company - a very Bubble 1.0 kind of oversight. And neither did Battelle, until the admission was dragged out of him by Jon Garfinkel of Civilities.net.
"Yes, The NYT Company is an investor in my company Federated Media," confessed Battelle "I very much doubt this had anything to do with my having a chance to write this but I agree, it should have been disclosed in the Op Ed somewhere."
Indeed so.
The Gray Lady, as the paper loves to be called, has a ponderous "Ethical Journalism Guidebook", which it threw away for the occasion.
Guideline #152: tells us:
Times readers apply exacting standards to the entire paper. They do not distinguish between staff written articles and those written by outsiders. Thus as far as possible, freelance contributors to The Times, while not its employees, will be held to the same standards as staff members when they are on Times assignments, including those for the Times Magazine."
Guideline #154 covers conflict of interests:
Assigning editors in business and financial news who deal with non-staff contributors have a special duty to guard against conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflict. To the extent possible, assigning editors should ensure that outside contributors meet the strict standards outlined in Section 12 above for the business and financial news staff.
The relevant guideline, #114, in Section 12 is:
No staff member may own stock or have any other financial interest in a company, enterprise or industry that figures or is likely to figure in coverage that he or she provides, edits, packages or supervises regularly.
While Guideline #152 reminds editors not to employ freelancers who fall foul of the ethics rules.
"If they violate these guidelines, they will be denied further assignments," it states. So it looks like Battelle's sparkling prose won't be troubling the Times op-ed readers again.
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The link to the NY Times "Ethical Journalism Guidebook" ought to be quite a treasure trove.
NYT has no ethics.
A giant loophole. Freelancers can therefore- Lie, fabricate, twist, skew, be biased, etc. Standards are quite low at the times.
bump
Just faith in Bolshevism.
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