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Comment by joshvm | Hacker News Reader

> To even visit the offices of tech giants—itself often a rare privilege—requires journalists to sign non-disclosure agreements.

Why is it weird that journalists have to sign an NDA to visit premises? Your job is explicitly to spread information and you're visiting a commercially sensitive area. I've worked with small companies (< 30 people) where entire floors were off limits if you didn't sign.

It'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't an expert in glass manufacture, you might let slip a key fact like "we saw a big machine before process Y" or "the glass at this point is red hot" (maybe everyone else has it orange-hot).

Why should any corporation let you visit their premises without suitable assurances?

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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.

I've declined the opportunity to receive pre-release review devices before because I didn't like the restrictions the NDA put on what I was allowed to say about them.

> every decent journalist would respect that parts of a tour would be off-the-record without the need for a legally binding document

Then they shouldn't have a problem agreeing to that in writing.

>Then they shouldn't have a problem agreeing to that in writing.

Um, you seem to have missed this part:

>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.

See, there's more stuff in the NDA than what common sense dictates. You can't just agree to the parts you don't have problem with.

Not my area of expertise, but isn't that unenforceable?

Not mine either, but why not?

"We have shown X during the tour. Joe and Mary certify that. The article mentions X. This is a violation of the NDA."

Even if X was common knowledge, once you sign the agreement, you're setting yourself up for trouble if you do something you agreed not to.

Well, that's kinda my point. If it's common knowledge, are you in trouble?

It's still reasonable to prevent the journalistic equivalent of parallel construction. Publishing is only half the equation...the other half is knowing what to go looking for. You can't expect companies to only protect themselves from one of those.

Sure you can, it is called negotiating, and if you can't come to a win-win agreement, there is no deal. Simple.

It's actually quite common to redline NDAs. At one previous employer nearly every company we entered discussions with asked us to cut two clauses in our NDA. We usually cut one and stood our ground on the other and I can only think of one case in several years where the compromise was unacceptable.

Why bother?

> Every decent journalist would respect that parts of a tour would be off-the-record without the need for a legally binding document.

Granted. Still, you don't know who's decent until it's too late. Even decent news organizations can hire utterly odious people, as in the Glass incident. Admittedly, that was more about making information up entirely, but the premise is valid: Even the best-respected news organizations could, potentially, ship you someone just untrustworthy enough that, without the immediate threat of an NDA, they'd leak.

Because that's where laws live: Most people would be largely decent without laws. Some few aren't decent even with very immediate penalties hanging over their heads. (This is a disorder in the DSM, in fact.) Others, some unknown fraction, are only decent because of law; that is, they lack much internalized morality, but they understand consequences well enough that laws keep them from doing bad things.

> Why should any corporation let you visit their premises without suitable assurances?

Correct me if I am wrong please, but it sounds like you are saying it's okay to trust corporations who are the subjects of media scrutiny to be the 'gatekeepers' 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.

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's) call to make, they must decide what the story is, and where the public interest lies.

Fair point about Nikon though, I think if you have a top-secret part of your factory that's just got to be permanently off-limits. Why risk it?

> No harm in the corporation asking for that level of control, but I do not believe savvy journalists would accept.

But at some point the tech companies will just say 'well then we don't want to interact with any journalists'. It seems today that tech companies certainly don't need journalists to help spread new feature announcements. I don't know why they bother talking to journalists at all already?

You are correct. They largely don't talk now.

My comment was specifically with regard to physically entering offices. In that situation I think it's reasonable to ask people to sign an NDA if they're likely to wander around sensitive areas.

The actual issue, as highlighted by some other comments, is how sweeping the NDAs can be. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know how testable these things are in court, but some of the clauses are so absurdly general that it would be almost impossible not to break them [1, 2].

There are valid reasons for showing people things they can't talk about. Even with an NDA, it's a strong statement of trust. You can also use it as a tool to build hype about an unreleased product, or to improve your relationship with the media. Who are journalists going to want to visit? The company that shows them cool toys, or the company that shows them meeting rooms and cubicles?

[1] https://cananian.livejournal.com/46914.html [2] https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2017/01/does-googles-n...

No. You can decline the NDA.

Whenever I visited Google as part of the NYTimes I (as instructed) would decline.

Meetings still happened.

The “How it’s made” tune just popped into my head.

“The worker takes the red-hot glass and transfers it to...”

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