A breathtakingly honest freelancer!

NYT public editor Byron Calame wrote about the ethics of freelance contributors in his Jan. 28 offering.

I note this sentence with a raised eyebrow:

"THE ability of The New York Times to maintain its ethical standards among its far-flung outside contributors continues to be a major concern of mine. As these freelancers fill column after column at a lower cost than full-time reporters, readers have a right to expect that editors ensure the integrity of that journalism."

However, the second-last of these grafs made me smile:

In a push in the right direction, the (Jan. 16) memo (from Craig R. Whitney and William E. Schmidt, two assistant managing editors) requires editors to ask freelancers if they are “familiar with our ethics rules” the next time each is given an assignment — and to “make it clear that continuing to contribute to The Times depends on observing those rules.” If a freelancer “deliberately disregards” the paper’s Ethical Journalism guidelines, “we stop giving assignments to that person,” the two editors warned.

So how did the freelancer conflicts on these stories escape detection before publication?

The freelancer who took the Samsung junket, John Biggs, had responded to the online ethics questionnaire for outside contributors in May, shortly after it became a requirement. “Have you accepted any free trips, junkets or press trips in the last two years?” one question asked. His negative response was accurate at that time, according to Mr. Whitney, who is also the paper’s standards editor.

After taking the October junket, primarily to write for CrunchGear.com, a blog about electronic gear, Mr. Biggs told me, he “simply forgot” about updating his ethics questionnaire response so Times editors would be aware of his conflict of interest and not assign him any Samsung stories. His editor doesn’t share his vague recollection that he mentioned Samsung’s role in his trip. In any case, comments he posted on CrunchGear on Oct. 17, the day he arrived in Seoul, make it clear to me that he understood the unethical aspect of junkets. “I’m here with Samsung,” he wrote, “suckling on the sweet teat of junket whoredom.”

Unfortunately, The Times’s online ethics questionnaire system requires updating of freelancer responses only every two years. Mr. Biggs, who in recent months has been writing brief articles almost every week for the business section, wasn’t asked to update his responses before writing the two stories about Samsung products in November.