Obviously I can’t speak for everyone, but I would guess that one of the major attractions of choosing a career in journalism over, for example, dentistry are the freebies. Oh yes.and the chance to make the world a better place by exposing hypocrisy, dishonesty and corruption. Quite honestly, the more noble aims of the journalistic profession don’t interest me in the slightest. I couldn’t give a stuff about all that idealistic clap-trap. I’m unashamedly in the game for the freebies and am never happier than when I am stuck down the sharp end of an aircraft with a pre take-off glass of Krug in my hand and on the way to some exotic destination at someone else’s expense.
After all, who wants to be reporting from some shell scarred hotel in the middle of a war zone when you can be sipping Bellinis on the terrace of the Hotel Cipriano in Venice? And if I can add value by knocking out 1300 words of totally unbiased critical appraisal, then so much the better. The reason freebies are so popular with journalists is very simple. Industry remuneration is so atrocious that most people need another justification to stay in the profession, and the remote prospect of a week’s paid holiday somewhere in the world is probably what keeps a lot of journalists from moving to more lucrative employment.
Sadly though, even this proud tradition of journalism may now be under threat. Management and senior editorial staff (having presumably tired of all the freebies they received when they were journos) are now full of zealous morality and have decided to clamp down on gifts and trips offered
to their minions. The theory is that all journalists can be bought, and a pen and pencil set in a gift box could mean the difference between a good car review and a bad car review.
Many newspapers now insist that gifts above a certain value be handed in to the editor to be auctioned for a good cause. It’s a noble objective and one to which I totally subscribe unless, of course, the gift happens to be a bottle of Glenfiddich 18 year old malt. In instances like these I am faced with a dilemma, but I have found a neat solution. I take the whisky home but write nothing about it. That way I can prove beyond any doubt that my journalistic integrity has not been impaired by an expensive gift.
Free overseas trips are a totally different matter because they cannot be regarded as gifts. They are either invitations to experience a holiday destination in order to write about it or they are business orientated (for example, a tour of an electronics factory in South Korea). Not so long ago, newspaper editors used free trips from the travel industry as a way of rewarding under-remunerated staff members, some of them not even journalists. The smarter tour operators rumbled this one and now invite a specific journalist from a publication insisting that the invitation is not transferable. Things have come to a pretty pass when newspapers effectively use other company’s money to make up the shortfall in their own staff’s remuneration.
If you happen to be involved in what is now known as lifestyle journalism, your very existence becomes one big blur of VIP lounges and duty free shops. Sponsored foreign trips are inevitable. They are part of the job and anybody who thinks it must be fun to fly around the world in pampered luxury going to expensive car launches and having dinner at Michelin starred restaurants is damn right.it is. Which is precisely why I never became a dentist.