Kai Kupferschmidt

"For a newspaper story you took a trip with all expenses paid by the story subject. Do you tell your readers about the payment?" That's a question most journalists (especially freelancers) have been confronted with. It is also one of the questions posed by Peter Vermij, a Dutch science journalist turned PR consultant, in a recent online survey on journalism ethics. More than a quarter of the journalists who responded said they would not tell their readers. On top of that a few percent said they would not even tell their editors. (You can see some of Peter's data here. I'll post a link to the finalized results when they are published.) So is that bad? Should they tell their readers? Should they not take such trips at all? Is the line between PR and journalism blurring? At the 8th World Conference of Science Journalists in Helsinki late last month, Peter organized a House of Commons-style debate to argue about this and similar questions. It was titled "Wearing many hats? How to preserve independence" and he asked me to give an opening statement arguing strongly that the two spheres of PR and journalism need to be kept apart. My charming US colleague Anne Sasso agreed to play the whore to my saint and argue for pragmatism.