Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Technology

Technology: View from the top
The privacy police?
TRUSTe CEO Bob Lewin explains how even sites selling personal data can get the nonprofit's privacy seal of approval.
By Lydia Lee
[03/13/00]

21st Challenge
21st Challenge No. 31 Results
"Pez Dispens'd" and other couplets in praise of tech gadgets.
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
[03/11/00]

Column
Their names are legion
The Verisign-Network Solutions deal shows how the scramble for domain-name turf has gone from frenzy to insanity.
By Scott Rosenberg
[03/10/00]

Books
Maybe the Net doesn't change everything
In "The Social Life of Information," John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid send technology futurists back to reexamine their crystal ball.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
[03/09/00]

Heart in darkness
Blood-spattering violence is par for the course in the black-as-night world of the gamer-geeks building Daikatana -- but there are also moments of sweet comfort.
By David Kushner
[03/08/00]

Complete archives for Technology

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Last summer, for far too long a period, the intricate details of my professional and financial life were on display for all to read. That's because I made $9,000 buying and selling some stock.

I bought the shares when a friend of many years put me on a "friends and family list" -- a chance to buy stock during his company's initial public offering; he'd included me because, well, he, his wife and I are friends. I never wrote about my friend. I had no plans to write about my friend. But, as a notebook-carrying chronicler of Silicon Valley's social, economic and political life, I knew I had an obligation to tell my editors and give them the chance to advise me against the purchase if they thought it was unethical.

In general, journalists are discouraged from owning stock in companies that they write about or even companies in industries they write about; the rule stems from a newsroom desire to avoid any perceived conflicts of interest. But unlike a lot of business staff writers, I don't cover markets, specific companies or products. I write about rumors, conversations and parties. "You don't write facts," said one CEO in the valley. "You write emotions."

And I didn't think I would get rich, but I figured the whole process -- getting on the "friends and family list," selling the newly issued stock just after it began trading -- offered a unique view of the dot-com IPO lottery. I quickly turned my experience into a story for Fortune magazine. I told the Merc about that, too.

Before that story could appear, though, Mercury News publisher Jay Harris read about me and my stock trade in the Wall Street Journal, and things took an ugly turn. The paper was clearly concerned that it would come under attack by those who believed my trade transgressed traditional ethical lines, and my editors quickly adopted a new story line: I wasn't a journalist at heart.

"You and I both know what you want to do," executive editor David Yarnold told me in our one conversation about the matter. "I suggest you think hard about whether or not you want to do it here."

But despite the newspaper's best efforts to convince me and anyone I might want to work for that I had failed -- ethically, morally and deliberately -- at a craft I've practiced for almost 20 years, I couldn't jump to the start-up Yarnold seemed so sure I wanted. Instead, within five months of being stripped of my Mercury News column and sent into exile at the paper's Redwood City bureau, I was back penning a weekly gossip column about Silicon Valley for the New York Post.

"You could build something," a friend said to me on the phone the other night, asking me if I'd thought about leaving journalism. Yes, but there are plenty of ways to build a career, and they aren't all based on corporate or individual profit. Sure, in my job you tell other people's stories. But if you're clever, you get to do it in your own way, offering up your take on the world. Rather than take dictation, jotting down the musings of CEO, engineer or venture capitalist, I try to ask questions that make people think about what they're doing. And why they're doing it.

As corny as it sounds, that's why I like being a reporter. I think it's an important job -- and in my book it's a career, not a steppingstone to a job someplace else.

On the East Coast -- Washington and New York -- where I've lived most of my life, journalism is a job that comes with a decent paycheck, some prestige and a few perks. Like many people who started in this business as newspapers were closing in city after city, I couldn't plan the steps of my career as neatly as I would have liked. But I've followed a steady path -- from a college stint as a research assistant for a Wall Street Journal reporter to covering Congress. And when I decided to move to California, it was to take what I considered a national reporting job as the Merc's Silicon Valley gossip columnist.

Next page | What was Fortune's Jodi Mardesich thinking when she quit to join a start-up?