Freelance Ethics Part 2

I had the opportunity earlier this month to be a panelist at the Vocus User Conference here in Washington DC. All the flacks wanted to hear what the Future of Media looks like from a freelance perspective…and out of all the freelancers in the DC area, they chose me. I’m humbled.

I’ll be honest with y’all, when they miked me up(!) I was a little nervous, but I think I did pretty well.

The moderator, Vocus’ Bill Wagner, asked a couple questions that got me thinking, though.

Bill wanted to know more about the mediabistro cocktail party I went to last year where an all-too-aggressive PR person wanted to engage in some mutual back-scratching. Essentially, for those who don’t remember (it was a year ago, after all), the flack offered me work writing press releases in exchange for favorable coverage of one of her clients.

I still get the shivers thinking about it.

Anyway, that was on my mind last week when I attended another mediabistro mixer (and I was honestly somewhat dreading that I’d run into this woman again, but I can’t even remember what she looked like at this point).

(Side note: Last year, I’m pretty sure there were a few comped appies. This year, not so much. And they say the media are bouncing back! Pah!)

I was chatting with a freelance friend of mine, saying something like, “Wow, the turnout is so much higher quality than last year–last year I just met sharks.” and explained the issue with the aggressive flack.

He said that that sort of thing happens all the time in the music freelance industry.

I’ve hardly covered music. It’s just not my thing (though I did write about Ted Leo’s new album once), so I had no idea. But his claim is that it’s totally common for a music freelancer to get good coverage for some album and then be offered work writing press releases for that label. The thing about music, I guess, is that much of it is assigned rather than pitched, because a magazine says “Oh, we have to do something about the new Vampire Weekend album” rather than waiting for a writer to say “Hey, I’ve got a feature on a great band nobody’s ever heard of.” Which means, I suppose, that you’re less likely to benefit from having done PR work for a label…other than by getting paid way more than you do for writing a music review. Which is why it’s so tempting.

An informal poll of my journalism and music friends garnered reactions ranging from “Ugh” to “That makes me feel weird but I completely understand it.”

So the issue of ethics and freelance is more thorny than I had initially thought. Sure, there are folks I know who cover both sides (journalism and marketing/PR), and do it well. But the rules are different, it appears, depending on what you’re actually writing about. Surely other beats—like energy policy or something that Actually Matters—frown on freelancers moonlighting for the American Clean Coal Institute.

I’ve done almost no marketing work, though once I wrote a fawning article for an internal company newsletter that paid very well (and gave me a bit of a suntan, as a bonus). I’m not sure how editors feel about writers who work both sides, but I would certainly want to disclose any connections I had before pitching an article to a newspaper or magazine.

I hope that, at least, is standard.

  1. Bill Wagner says:

    Interesting follow-up to our discussion Rachel and I’m sure many others struggle with this issue. Not sure there is a right or wrong but agree with you that disclosure is the minimum

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