| |||
|
Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body Media Mothers Who Think News People Politics2000 - Free Software Project Travel & Food ![]() Columnists
Current Click here to read the latest stories from the wires. - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - View From the Top - - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon Technology stories, go to the
Technology home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon Technology Silicon Follies Complete archives for Technology - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
New ethics for the new economy?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
August 6, 1999 |
The former Silicon Valley gossip queen for the San Jose Mercury News has
been sent into exile, stripped of
her popular "Talk is Cheap" column and moved to the newspaper's outlying
Peninsula Bureau. Her cardinal sin: accepting discounted friends-and-family
stock from the CEO of AutoWeb and selling it for a tidy profit of $9,000.
The CEO is an old friend of hers, she says, and she had never mentioned
AutoWeb in her column; still, she is paying dearly for that $9,000. Her
editors, who failed to advise her against accepting the stock when she
asked for their guidance, have also been reprimanded. Nolan's predicament has the technology journalism industry abuzz -- and not
just about whether it was right or wrong for her to accept the stock. Like
Nolan, many people in technology journalism have poked a finger into the
entrepreneurial pie -- some own technology stocks or Internet-oriented
mutual funds; others have moonlighted for tech companies, as consultants
or writers of technical "white papers"; a few sit on the boards of tech companies, or of
their own start-ups. Journalism, after all, is not where the big money is, and many technology
writers would like to afford a life not too different from the lives of the
entrepreneurs and technologists they write about. Some have begun to ask
themselves if journalists must be barred from the profits the rest of
society is making by investing in tech stocks. What if, they ask, the
stocks are only tangentially related to their reporter's turf of Silicon Valley? As tech journalists dabble in entrepreneurship and investing, some are reinterpreting the traditional rules governing conflict of interest. What was once a matter of black-and-white ethics has lately turned a murky shade of gray. | ||
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.