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Apple shill David Pogue busted
https://gawker.com/5818625/nyt-tech-columnist-spanked-for-flagrant-violation-of-ethics-policy
Star tech writer David Pogue has been publicly admonished by his editors at New York Times on ethics again, for charging flacks $159 each to learn how to get into his column. How many times must this happen, David?
Pogue’s “Pitch Me, Baby” presentation explained, by example, just how to get on the good side of David Pogue. “I’m one of the guys public-relations people work with,” Pogue wrote on his website. “This talk, geared for PR professionals, also offers a few of the most hilariously bad, and impressively good, pitches I’ve seen in my days at the Times.”
possibleimpossible.com
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26 Replies
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[Aharon Rothschild] “Star tech writer David Pogue has been publicly admonished by his editors at New York Times on ethics again, for charging flacks $159 each to learn how to get into his column. How many times must this happen, David?
Pogue’s “Pitch Me, Baby” presentation explained, by example, just how to get on the good side of David Pogue. “I’m one of the guys public-relations people work with,” Pogue wrote on his website. “This talk, geared for PR professionals, also offers a few of the most hilariously bad, and impressively good, pitches I’ve seen in my days at the Times.””
What is the purpose of posting this? All the info from Pogue’s column that’s relevant to the FCP X discussion was also given to other outlets such as Studio Daily, and has now been confirmed by Apple in the FAQ and via reports out of tonight’s London event.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Kenny] “What is the purpose of posting this?”
It’s not that hard to understand the relevance of the OP pointing this out, considering the size of David Pogue’s megaphone at the NYT, and other media outlets. He has written much about X, most of which has had a rather positive spin that seems to be swimming upstream against a larger tide of negative opinion. That has led some to question his expertise, or judgment.
The NYT’s readers’ representative Arthur Brisbane doesn’t have a dog in the FCP X fight, but he does have an opinion on Pogue regarding conflict of interest in the Public Editors Journal:
“My predecessor, Clark Hoyt, wrote about an ethical quandary caused by another of Pogue’s many ventures. Pogue had created “The Missing Manual” series of guides to tech products, and in August 2009 his manual on Apple’s new Snow Leopard operating system was about to be released at the same time he was reviewing Snow Leopard for the Times. This conflict led The Times and Pogue to include an ethics and disclosure note on his Times Topics page.The “Pitch Me” presentation might strike some as pretty harmless. But there is a reason why The Times ethics policy proscribes it. Times readers deserve to be assured that journalists don’t get too cozy with the P.R. professionals who strive to influence coverage. A virtual army of publicists, media specialists and others stands ready every day to infiltrate the news with stories that help their employers.“.
The entire piece seems pretty relevant, and can be read here:
https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/06/times-curbs-pogues-pr-appearances/A guy in Pogue’s position needs to be squeaky clean, and avoid all perceived conflicts in interest.
Pogue spends a lot of time writing how-to books, and giving talks about products made by popular technology companies. And coincidentally often reviews them as well. Even if he receives no direct compensation from them, it seems he has a financial stake in the sales of these products doing well since that might lead to more sales for his related services and products. This latest incident, combined with previous similar run-ins with the NYT readers’ representative and standards editor gives the impression that Pogue exercises poor judgment and has a difficult time understanding the NYT ethics rules, in regards to product reviews and conflict of interest.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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[Chris Kenny] “All the info from Pogue’s column that’s relevant to the FCP X discussion was also given to other outlets such as Studio Daily, and has now been confirmed by Apple in the FAQ and via reports out of tonight’s London event.”
What about when he said they were working with RED? Then you could check the RED forum and find out straight from RED’s employees that the statement was not true at that time.
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[Brian Langeman] “What about when he said they were working with RED? Then you could check the RED forum and find out straight from RED’s employees that the statement was not true at that time.”
I dismissed this at the time as Pogue misunderstanding what he was being told, because he’s a journalist with no specific knowledge of these issues. Others tried to use it to discredit all the other info he was passing on from Apple.
The other info turned out to be right.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Scott Sheriff] “It’s not that hard to understand the relevance of the OP pointing this out, considering the size of David Pogue’s megaphone at the NYT, and other media outlets. He has written much about X, most of which has had a rather positive spin that seems to be swimming upstream against a larger tide of negative opinion. That has led some to question his expertise, or judgment.”
The value in Pogue’s coverage of FCP X has been the fact that he’s been passing on information he was given by Apple (usually but not always accurately), with full disclosure that he was simply passing on information he was given by Apple. The kind of ethics issues raised by the behavior discussed in this thread don’t really come into play there.
Raising this ethics issues here seems a lot like sour grapes on the part of people who tried to discredit the information Pogue was passing on (most of which has now been confirmed). It simply has no relevance to the ongoing discussion of FCP X.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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You need to seriously rethink this – he’s a columnist. This isn’t hard news, and there is no “ethics violation” in massaging PR sources. He gets on their good side, every journalist does this.
People just LOOOOOOOVVVVEEEEEE to hate this guy, don’t they?
Writer/Radio host/Community Media Advocate
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[Adam McCune] “You need to seriously rethink this – he’s a columnist. This isn’t hard news, and there is no “ethics violation” in massaging PR sources. He gets on their good side, every journalist does this.”
Clearly the people at the NYT don’t agree with your point of view, saying that this does in fact violate their ethics standards. Go read the column. This is not the first time that he has had the NYT (his employer) come down against him regarding conflict of interest, and the column points out Pogue having conflict of interest issues as recently as the Snow Leopard release. Are we seeing a pattern here? If the paper you write for says you have a conflict(s) of interest, that would seem like the bottom line.
And I would disagree that only hard news has ethics standards. Consumer reporters, while not hard news, still have to abide by ethics rules, including avoiding conflict of interest.
So if the folks writing your paycheck don’t give you a hall pass on this, that pretty much says it all.Scott Sheriff
Director
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.” —Red Adair
Where were you on 6/21?
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[Chris Kenny] “The other info turned out to be right.”
But the RED info is one of the most important things to me. You can’t just “dismiss” that.
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[Brian Langeman] “But the RED info is one of the most important things to me. You can’t just “dismiss” that.”
Huh? I wasn’t dismissing the importance of the feature, I was dismissing Pogue’s information about it. We don’t really know anything on the subject of R3D support at this point. My guess is that Pogue was passing on a corrupted version of something about some sort of mechanism to allow FCP X to be extended to support more codecs, but we’ll have to wait and see.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Kenny] “We don’t really know anything on the subject of R3D support at this point. “
??
We know it’s not natively supported and that, when FCPX launched, Red wasn’t working with Apple to provide native support. We know it’s the only NLE that doesn’t support native .r3d files. We know that Apple has made no official statement about .r3d support. That’s pretty substantial to quite a few people. To say we really don’t know anything about .r3d support is rather dismissive.
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Michael Hancock
Editor
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