Corporate Kabuki
Jun 25th, 2007 at 12:28 pm by Susie
See, now this is just wrong. You just can’t impose your publication’s code of ethics on a freelancer.
“Interestingly, during my ‘you’re fired’ phone conversation with the editor and editorial page editor on Friday afternoon, they mentioned that the Journal Star code of ethics covered freelancers as well as full-time staffers. I responded that it would have been nice, then, if they had thought to share that policy with their freelancers.
“You could have cut the long and uncomfortable silence with a knife.”
Newspapers, of course, want to have it both ways. They want to keep talent on the string without giving them security or paying any benefits, but they want to treat them like employees if it becomes a public relations problem.
If they want to tell me what I can do in my spare time, they damned well better be giving me a regular paycheck.
This is also an interesting legal issue, since many of these publications also forbid employees from working for other publications. Courts are not usually sympathetic to anything that unduly restricts your ability to make a living unless you receive considerable renumeration.
UPDATE: Gotta love this quote:
Journalists should get out of the games of image control and manipulating public perception. The story here is not that a few journalists are giving money to political campaigns, it’s that so many others will judge and cast aspersions because they’re more concerned about “how this looks” than they are about the actual world around them.
Yep. I’ve seen reporters tilt stories in a politician’s favor because they’re friendly with them, and I’m a lot more worried about that than this - particularly when the person is an opinion columnist, anyway.
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