This is a fair question. At my company, we take news wherever we find it.
We can't afford to turn good stories away just because somebody already
knows somebody. We make our living by knowing people.
A larger company like PNH might apply rules like what you're proposing,
though. Even there, though, there is more flexibility than you might think.
Reporters get story ideas based on their own real-life involvements all the
time; they just write them out of the story (as I did). You won't find out
about those connections unless you're chatting with the writer.
I also think the smaller the social scale of a news story, the fuzzier these
lines become. University City is too small a world to sustain a large pool
of writers about community issues who are paid full-time to just study them
and report on them. In a small world, people who know about things and
people who do things often are one and the same.
-- Tony West
Bigger question, for me, is the inappropriateness of a reporter being
involved personally in a story he's covering. I thought that was contrary
to journalist's ethics. (Likewise, I thought it odd if the UC Review was
going to get involved in running community meetings on UCD.) I'll leave it
to the constitutional scholars on the list to wonder about the
intersection of free press and free speech rights in the First Amendment.
Paul
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