When an ethics cop carries tweezers in his holster instead of a .44 Magnum, it’s a safe bet the crimes he’ll pursue will be cosmetic. New York Times Public Editor Byron Calame conformed to this profile yesterday (Feb. 26) by using his column to give the paper’s eyebrows a vigorous plucking in his exploration of the “thorny question” of whether its news staffers can accept companywide discounts for goods “without creating the appearance of partiality.”
Calame produces no example of favored editorial treatment for any of the 88 companies that offer discounts to New York Times Co. employees on the company’s internal Web site. Still, he worries that discounts on cars, home mortgages, flowers, beauty spa treatments, and more, when collected by news staffers, “are often perceived as ‘freebies’ that can erode credibility with readers.” (Of the company’s 11,965 employees, about 1,200 reporters, clerks, editors, editorialists, columnists, and photographers work on the Times editorial side.)
I’d fret about eroded credibility, too, if the discounts amounted to much of a bribe. But they don’t. Take the car discounts offered to Times Co. employees—$925 off a Saturn, $10,660 off a Chevy Tahoe, and an offer to purchase a Hyundai for $100 over total invoice. Such straight discounts are meaningless unless a base price from which the discounts will be calculated is given. As for the Hyundai offer—$100 over invoice—it isn’t necessarily the best deal you can negotiate for the carmaker’s vehicles.
I was working on my laptop last week when it suddenly appeared: the dreaded spinning pinwheel of death. It’s a multicolored rotating ball that signifies one’s Apple computer has momentarily frozen. The pinwheel spun, and spun, and spun. It turned out my hard drive had crashed. My tech friend Ted examined it and said that my five years’ worth of computer files might be lost unless I took the drive to a place called DriveSavers in Novato, which specializes in rescuing data from hard drives that have stopped working.
I didn’t end up recovering my data.
But I did retrieve some fascinating information thanks to my conversation with a DriveSavers sales rep, who tipped me off to a story involving the age-old journalistic quandary of swag — the free goodies and services companies incessantly press upon journalists in hopes of getting positive press.
DriveSavers frequently provides services to people involved in fields such as movie and music production, whose lost files can be worth fortunes. And the standard DriveSavers fee for a successful data-recovery operation is $2,700, far too rich for my blood.
When I told the DriveSavers sales representative that my drive contained mostly text files because I was a journalist, the sales rep said that a CBS journalist had recently been “comped” free disk-retrieval service as part of a story he’d done on the company, and that I might want to write a story about DriveSavers, too. I got a story all right, but not the one DriveSavers had in mind. It turned out the sales representative was referring to a situation in which New York Times columnist David Pogue, who is also a contributor to CBS News and National Public Radio, received $2,000 in free personal-data-recovery services from DriveSavers in connection with pieces Pogue did for all three news organizations. Pogue wrote the stories after his own drive crashed, entombing his voice message and e-mail files.
“I think what I wrote in the column puts it best: ‘This unfortunate event was, perhaps, my opportunity to review a service I’d always wondered about,'” Pogue told me, by way of explanation of his free-service arrangement.
