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Comment by desu | Hacker News Reader

This goes way beyond Pogue. There are plenty of journalists of all stripes whose writings I would suspect a lot less if I knew, say, their entire stock portfolio.

Having David place all (all!) his personal investments into a blind trust seems like an excellent idea which many other media personalities' credibility might benefit from. The same goes double for anyone talking about the stock market directly, especially "analysts" - in fact it arguably should be a condition of the job.

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Right, but the main issue here is not related to his stocks, it is related to the fact that he writes manuals for products he reviews. I don't entirely understand why this is such a big issue - it is normal, for example, for someone who has written a biography of say Sibelius, to be asked to review Sibelius recordings or perhaps somebody else's review of Scandinavian composers. I'm not sure why technology should be different. Yes there is a potential conflict of interest, but normal disclosure rules seem to cover them.

Oh yeah, in his particular case sure. But I was speaking about the general case of journalists whose words might affect the market or who could otherwise stand to gain by influencing public opinion. That is much more common than Pogue, who is kind of a one-off.

Two issues here:

1) the "normal disclosure rules" weren't in effect, up until now-- there was no requirement (or expectation) for Pogue to mention that he was also writing books related to the review subjects;

2) the "Sibelius" example isn't quite analogous; in this case, you have someone recommending that people upgrade to Snow Leopard, when he has (through book sales) a vested interest in seeing that people upgrade to Snow Leopard (and not skip this release.)

That being said, I think the NYT handled the case admirably.

I suppose the conflict of interest would arise if Pogue had been asked by Apple to write up a Missing Manual for Snow Leopard. (Was he? No, afaik, but [citation needed])

Conversely, one might say that he'd decided to create such a manual for Snow Leopard because he genuinely believed what he'd written in his review, and felt the product worthy enough to warrant such an act. But then again, I suppose anyone who reads Pogue's columns/blog regularly would know he's a MASSIVE Apple fan-boy (neutral observation - I'm not judging him..)

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