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Seems like a big conflict of interest here and changes the tone from "see this from another perspective" to "I am defending my friend, so everything I write is going to be heavily biased"

Why? She is probably one of three or four people on the planet qualified to speak to what actually happened there. The idea that she should recuse herself from publicly posting an account of what she saw first-hand just because she's friends with the subject of the controversy doesn't hold water in my opinion. In fact, since pretty much every article that has come out (all by people who were not themselves in attendance) has had the goal of making attacks against the company and its executives, perhaps a friend of an executive who can offer a personal insight into what happened is the best person of all to write an account of what really happened.

It seems that the public at large is more than happy to be spoon-fed facts from Pando Daily, Gawker, and BuzzFeed who carelessly level poorly-researched personal attacks heavily-weighted with personal opinions and biases passed off as "journalism" without actually asking themselves the simple question- "What has my own personal experience been?" I for one like Uber and Lyft, and use both regularly. Never have I or anybody I know experienced any serious problem after having used them several hundred times, despite the constant onslaught of accusations that females are at risk using it.

Compare that to the taxi industry. In fact, just last week, after learning that I needed to pay for my ride with a card for expense reasons, refused to let me out of the cab and tried to drive me to an atm against my will and I had to call the police to make him stop the car. This is a true story. Happened last time I took a cab. Despite the fact that it is a law where I live that cabs MUST take a credit card.

I'm certainly not suggesting that it is okay to spy on people with the intent of blackmailing or evening the score (and I suspect most everyone would agree with that). I'm just suggesting that we be fair in our criticism. Blogs have a very real incentive to get the most page views that they can and are more than happy to do so at anybody's expense. I've seen that happen enough to know not to take anything I read on the internet at face-value.

Disclosing the friendship up front isn't a recusal. It's simple honesty.

Does Buzzfeed disclose upfront in every article that their VCs invest in Uber competitors?

Well then in that case, can we ask the likes of Pando and Gawker to disclose at the beginning of their accounts that they were not actually at the dinner and all information is based on second-hand accounts?

Maybe if they are feeling extra generous admit that they have a vendetta and personal bias against Uber because the CEO made a reference to "boobs" in an interview? Something that most people in the real world, I have to tell you, probably don't actually care about.

Uh, news stories are based on accounts. Are you saying every news story should start "I wasn't there, but a reliable source told me'?

Because that would get tiresome very quickly.

Uh, no, it was a rhetorical question. I'm saying that if we want to make some special case that the author must disclose that she knows the subject of her article before describing what she witnessed first-hand, then we should maybe recognize the fact that all other people reporting on this topic with so much certainty as to what happened weren't actually there. If you read pretty much any Pando article you will find that all citations to past articles seemingly supporting the main thesis are actually other poorly-researched stories written by other Pando authors. After all, how reliable is a source who is a writer for BuzzFeed?

Here's one example of sensationalist headlines masquerading as journalism from a cursory scan of the front page (yes, he is citing a BuzzFeed article that is apparently citing an internal memo that despite some crafty sensationalist language, is doing nothing more than outlining plans to hire an internal research department). Is this somebody who has a less-biased view of the situation that the HuffPo author?

http://pando.com/news/uber-sought-to-hire-opposition-researc...

Nicole Campbell is not a journalist, so yes, very different standards apply to her when she is given a voice in a newspaper.

She has no career to lose and so must be far more open about her relationship. It's bizarre that HuffPo thought it was even appropriate to publish the story given that relationship, in traditional newspapers you would expect it to appear in the letters section not as an article.

My experience of cabbies has been pretty good. Then again, I usually make sure that I have cash in my wallet to pay for them before embarking or ask them to find a cashpoint on the way.

If they have working card machines, they often lose signal or are being slow and expense departments are perfectly capable of dealing with cabbie receipts.

>I am not trying to say that the original story by Ben wasn't sensationalist, but it wasn't a fabricated lie either

Is it not a fabrication when you take something that was clearly a hypothetical statement and report it as if you overheard it at a strategy meeting? Both Ben and Sarah's stories represented that this wasn't a hypothetical, but rather a plan that would be carried out against Sarah and her children immediately.

IMO, that is a fabrication.

"take something that was clearly a hypothetical statement and report it as if you overheard it at a strategy meeting?"

No one has done this.

Except for Sarah and Ben, along with every derivative article and news report published on this since this started.

Title of Buzzfeed article: "Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists"

Even Ben's own quotes in that article indicate it wasn't a serious suggestion.

Right. What he did not do was present it as if it came from an Uber corporate strategy meeting.

> You would think someone commenting on such an important and controversial story in tech like this would fully disclose that she is in-fact friends with Emil and worked with him?

But isn't the only reason you know those facts because she did disclose them? Like, right there in that line you quoted?

No.

The article would have held more credibility in my eyes if she was upfront about the fact there was a conflict of interest before continuing on with the article. Heck, even an article on the likes of Techcrunch with even a remote tinge of conflict of interest is disclosed in the first paragraph before you get into the article contents. I legitimately feel misled, I was to feel as though I was reading an impartial account of what happened that night only to be told at the end that the account was from a friend nonetheless.

Lets be honest, in most cases, a friend will always defend another friend regardless of the context or the situation. It is rare that a friend will throw another under the bus, especially in a situation like this. This is why everything Nicole says is hearsay because she could easily be exaggerating what she thought she heard all for the sake of defending her friend. We do not even know for certain if Nicole heard anything to do with what happened, we were offered no new bits of information we did not already have.

Interesting that you are seemingly willing to take several second-hand accounts and interpretations of what his comments were and the context in which they were made from sources nowhere near the room, yet are okay assuming that what she wrote is merely "hearsay" or "exaggerated" despite her claim that she was sitting next to them during the conversation.

I don't, by the way, find this to be a coincident. It seems perfectly logical that you would sit near people you know at a dinner party.

> You would think someone commenting on such an important and controversial story in tech like this would fully disclose that she is in-fact friends with Emil and worked with him?

She did! You quoted it in your post!

Yes Nicole did, right at the end of her article. As I mentioned in another reply, even sites like Techcrunch who are no strangers to half-baked journalism themselves disclose conflicts of interest at the beginning of their articles. It is misleading in my opinion.

I think you really are looking to say something critical.

As you clearly have nothing substantial to say, your claim 'the disclosure is in the wrong part of the article' is specious.

Let's man up and admit that the whole story that's been pushed over last few days is looking like BS.

And all that she's reporting is her own judgements of the incident and a light confirmation that the conversation took place. She confirms almost every detail that the buzzfeed article states, including the suggestion of targeting Sarah Lacy's personal life.

They built different narratives of the event, largely colored by the biases of each. The journalist had a bias towards building sensation and the friend had a bias towards downplay. If you don't read news articles expecting the bias of a journalist, then I'm sorry, I don't know what you are doing. But until that ending line in the article, she was a well-placed, mostly unbiased, bystander.

As long as she disclosed it at all I have no qualms with the position of said disclosure in the article. Perhaps if it was a 10 page article I would have a problem but it's 6 paragraphs! If a reader's attention span is that short it's their own fault.

> If a reader's attention span is that short it's their own fault.

It's not [necessarily] about attention span. Most people don't have time to read in entirety every single article that they come across.

I'm sure you've skimmed articles, or read just the first paragraph or two and decided it wasn't that interesting (maybe the subject matter was different than what you expected from the headline or maybe the article was poorly written).

In this particular case disclosing a potential conflict of interest at the beginning is important because it's helpful to keep the potential conflict in mind when reading it. Some people may prefer not reading it all because of the conflict of interest so disclosing it early on can save the reader's time. [i.e. I wouldn't bother reading an article on net neutrality written by a friend of Comcast's CEO]

Okay, so you've backed down from "You'd think she would have disclosed that" to "I would prefer she prefaced the article with that". I'm content.

I'm going to join the chorus of people who think that her disclosure was clear enough, and that your critique of it seems be a needlessly uncharitable reading and/or mean-spirited.

I'm a personal friend of Nicole and it didn't strike me as odd. She doesn't have a dishonest bone in her body, really. I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't even register that people might find her prior friendship to be a conflict of interest.

Not saying it wouldn't have been helpful up front, but the message is still valid IMO. Understandably I'm a bit biased for the author, but I'm also not the biggest Uber fan so if that helps...

The trouble with the order the article was presented in, is that it buries the lede (the lede here being that the author has a very significant personal bias, which can color the reader's perspective of the rest of the article).

The author chose (subconsciously or not, strategically or not) to defer mention of that important fact to the end, by which point many readers will have already given up reading. It is a fact that people pay more attention to the beginning of an article and that a significant proportion of people fall off the end and don't finish.

It only "buries the lede" for those who are desperate enough to find some reason to discredit it, which is going to be the natural impulse of most torch-and-pitchfork wielding people in this internet mob.

> I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't even register that people might find her prior friendship to be a conflict of interest.

If that were the case she wouldn't have mentioned it at all.

It was like four-and-a-half paragraphs. The author didn't "hide" the note about her connection to Emil at the end of a twenty-page snoozefest. Seems like plenty sufficient disclosure to me.

The proper thing to do is to disclose it right at the start since it obviously colors the whole report.

And doing so would obviously color how the report is perceived.

Yes. As it should.

An up-front and prominent disclosure could also color my perception in the author's favor, and I'd be more inclined to give higher credence to author's arguments.

> Emil said what he said, this article even confirms that.

Here's my big problem with all this: nobody defending this guy is saying "no, he didn't say that," or "no, he was joking," or even, "no, it was taken out of context." They're saying, essentially, that he wouldn't have disclosed his internal thought process if he knew it would be made public. I definitely wouldn't want one of my jokes or hypotheticals to be quoted out of context. But what I don't get is staying stuff you actually mean and then getting upset that people call you an asshole for thinking and believing the things you actually think and believe.

From the article:

"I heard a mention of a Sarah Lacy and overheard Emil say that he felt terrible that by writing an article, Sarah had actually suggested that people choose less safe alternatives based on a charge of sexism that was really a personal attack on the CEO with no basis in fact. Emil then said that Sarah wouldn't like it if someone wrote false things about her or published an article that was factually wrong because we all have done things in our private lives we are not proud of.

There was no anti-feminist sentiment, no attacking families, no attacking children, no anger, no threats against anyone, no action plan. Nothing. It was clear to me that this was all a vague, civilized conversation. I am a woman and I am sensitive to any kind of talk like that. "

(my emphasis.)

I don't know whether she's telling the truth, but she's definitely saying "no, he didn't say that" to the most grave things he's been accused of saying.

He's also describing what she overheard to contravene the testimony of someone who was actually a party to the conversation.

Conflict of interest? What about the desire to break a story (and make your career) vs reporting what actually happened without sensationalising it?

ad hominem