Key Takeaways:
- Local news sites generally look askance at accepting anything more valuable than a cup of coffee.
- Like many larger news organizations, they do often accept free tickets to entertainment events for review purposes.
Tracy Record, West Seattle Blog
Be prepared to explain it
We won’t take freebies. We have to keep reminding people of the lines. Because I’m a traditionalist, it’s not hard for me, but it’s hard sometimes to make them understand. People sometimes bristle about it a bit if we come to cover the awards banquet or the annual fundraiser. Why won’t you eat lunch with us? And I have to explain, unless I paid for this – and I don’t feel like paying 50 bucks right now, like you guys all did – I’m not going to just take your free food. I’m a journalist, and we’re not going to cross that ethics line. But thank you very much, maybe we’ll drink a glass of water or a cup of tea – something that’s not going to look like a conflict.
Kat Powers, Wicked Local
It sometimes means eating elsewhere
I’ve been dealing with that my whole career to the point where I had to stop going to one of my favorite restaurants. When they saw me, it was look, this is the girl who wrote about our liquor license, we should be nice to her! Here, have our lobster ravioli! And I have to say, you don’t understand – I know your culture is, “I feed people, let’s be friendly,” but I’m coming from a culture of “Don’t give me stuff, because it looks like I’m going to treat you differently” – and, frankly, I’m not going to treat you differently.
If you go write a story about the new gym, you are not allowed to accept a six-month membership.
My personal line has always been, of course I’ll accept a cup of coffee, because when you come into my newsroom I’ll give you a cup of coffee, but that’s about the end of it. And every time I have a new intern, even if it’s a marketing intern, you are now being held up to the same standard that I am. If you go write a story about the new gym, you are not allowed to accept a six-month membership.
Andrew Huff, Gaper’s Block
The appeals can be blatant
We’re bombarded with PR and marketing pitches, and often they include free products or free meals, and that gets into somewhat dicey ground. I got something just this week from a shoe manufacturer. It was blatant: we will send you free shoes if you write about us. We can put you in as part of our blog marketing program. They were basically trying to bribe us into writing about it. I’ve been trained as a journalist, but not everybody in the field has that background. I imagine that plenty of people took them up on that offer.
With music and arts, covering theater, concerts, it’s pretty much expected, as press, if we’re going to review it, chances are we’re getting a press pass. But in the case of a restaurant, occasionally they’ll set up something where there’s an invite to dine, a media dinner of some sort. In cases where we do take that offer up, our policy is to mention that.
We probably don’t do as many restaurant reviews as we would like simply because we can’t afford to pay for everybody’s meals. It is a tradeoff, but there’s plenty of news we can cover without taking that stuff.
