Posts under ‘Ethics’

Journalist Chris Carey is partnering with Mark Cuban on a new project that offers great promise and raises some serious questions. Chris writes, in an e-mail: I’m leaving the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at the end of this week to launch an investigative business journalism site, Sharesleuth.com. The blog-style news site will be devoted to exposing […]

(Here’s an op-ed column I wrote for PR Week, on the issue of buzz marketing.) When I was in my 20s, I rented an upstairs apartment from a middle-aged couple. Not long after I moved in, they invited me down for a beer. After a brief chat, they launched into a pitch to a) sell […]

Wall Street Journal: Yahoo Defends China Cooperation. Yahoo’s Terry Semel faced tough questions from Walt Mossberg — and the audience — over the search company’s decision to comply with requests for user data from the Chinese government, which has used the information to pursue dissidents. I’m one of the audience members who asked Semel a […]

Mark Glaser asks if this is the case. This calls for some serious sleuthing. Anyone want to help?

Legal Times: Numbers Game: Gonzales Launches DOJ Project Safe Childhood With Mysterious Figure. (NBC News correspondent Chris) Hansen’s source, according to the “Dateline” report: unnamed “law enforcement officials.” Asked who those law enforcement officials were, Hansen told Legal Times that “this is a number that was widely used in law enforcement circles,” though he couldn’t […]

How apt. A Financial Times editorial appeared on the last day of the WeMedia conference (“Excuse me while I borrow liberally“) commenting on how the mainstream media should learn from bloggers to show attribution for ideas and provide transparency. While observing the recent cases of high-profile plagiarism, Tim Harford considers something bloggers have done well: […]

In Editor & Publisher’s remarkable story, “Letter Reveals Reason for Firing of Vermont AP Chief,” the news cooperative’s explanation doesn’t begin to pass the smell test. The story says Christopher Graff “was terminated for distributing a column by Sen. Patrick Leahy that promoted open public records, according to his termination letter obtained by E&P today. […]

NY Times: Publisher to Recall Harvard Student’s Novel. Just a day after saying it would not withdraw “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life” from bookstores, Little, Brown, the publisher of the novel whose author, Kaavya Viswanathan, confessed to copying passages from another writer’s books, said it would immediately recall all […]

Harvard Crimson: Sophomore Novelist Admits To Borrowing Language From Earlier Books. Kaavya Viswanathan ’08 admitted yesterday to borrowing language from two books by Megan F. McCafferty, though the student novelist said that “any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious.” “Completely unintentional and unconscious” — really? Take a look at […]

Scot Hacker: Where’s Tibet? When we think about Google being in bed with the Chinese government and blocking access to information about Tibet, we know it’s bad, but we also assume the censorship applies only to Google users in China. Here we have an example of Google’s complicity affecting searches conducted from anywhere in the […]