<story><title>We need a new model for tech journalism</title><url>https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/tech-journalism.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joshvm</author><text>&amp;gt; To even visit the offices of tech giants—itself often a rare privilege—requires journalists to sign non-disclosure agreements.&lt;p&gt;Why is it weird that journalists have to sign an NDA to visit premises? Your job is explicitly to spread information and you&amp;#x27;re visiting a commercially sensitive area. I&amp;#x27;ve worked with small companies (&amp;lt; 30 people) where entire floors were off limits if you didn&amp;#x27;t sign.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s easy for a journalist to describe something without realising its importance within the community. There was an article recently about a tour of a Nikon lens factory and they were forbidden to talk or describe certain furnaces. If you weren&amp;#x27;t an expert in glass manufacture, you might let slip a key fact like &amp;quot;we saw a big machine before process Y&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;the glass at this point is red hot&amp;quot; (maybe everyone else has it orange-hot).&lt;p&gt;Why should &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; corporation let you visit their premises without suitable assurances?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eli</author><text>The NDA terms are sometimes onerous. For example, prohibiting you from talking about unreleased products regardless of how you come to know about them, not just from what you see on the tour. Every decent journalist would respect that parts of a tour would be off-the-record without the need for a legally binding document.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve declined the opportunity to receive pre-release review devices before because I didn&amp;#x27;t like the restrictions the NDA put on what I was allowed to say about them.</text></comment>
<story><title>We need a new model for tech journalism</title><url>https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/tech-journalism.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joshvm</author><text>&amp;gt; To even visit the offices of tech giants—itself often a rare privilege—requires journalists to sign non-disclosure agreements.&lt;p&gt;Why is it weird that journalists have to sign an NDA to visit premises? Your job is explicitly to spread information and you&amp;#x27;re visiting a commercially sensitive area. I&amp;#x27;ve worked with small companies (&amp;lt; 30 people) where entire floors were off limits if you didn&amp;#x27;t sign.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s easy for a journalist to describe something without realising its importance within the community. There was an article recently about a tour of a Nikon lens factory and they were forbidden to talk or describe certain furnaces. If you weren&amp;#x27;t an expert in glass manufacture, you might let slip a key fact like &amp;quot;we saw a big machine before process Y&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;the glass at this point is red hot&amp;quot; (maybe everyone else has it orange-hot).&lt;p&gt;Why should &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; corporation let you visit their premises without suitable assurances?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tombrossman</author><text>&amp;gt; Why should any corporation let you visit their premises without suitable assurances?&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I am wrong please, but it sounds like you are saying it&amp;#x27;s okay to trust corporations who are the subjects of media scrutiny to be the &amp;#x27;gatekeepers&amp;#x27; of information, setting ground rules and defining what may or may not go into a news article. This is a horrifically bad idea if you care about journalistic integrity.&lt;p&gt;No harm in the corporation asking for that level of control, but I do not believe savvy journalists would accept. It is their (or their editor&amp;#x27;s) call to make, they must decide what the story is, and where the public interest lies.&lt;p&gt;Fair point about Nikon though, I think if you have a top-secret part of your factory that&amp;#x27;s just got to be permanently off-limits. Why risk it?</text></comment>