Media Notes
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 23, 2004; 8:52 AM
Tightening StandardsFiled under: Blotcher Blog , Strange NYTimesFreelance reporter Jay Blotcher says he enjoyed being an Upstate stringer for the New York Times for more than two years -- until he was "completely blindsided" by being dismissed.
The paper is conducting a review of its part-time staffers, and someone recalled that Blotcher had been a spokesman for the activist group ACT UP in the late 1980s. He says he also did some work for the American Foundation for AIDS Research from 1995 to 1999.
In an e-mail, Metro Editor Susan Edgerley told Blotcher: "I am setting the bar high to protect against any appearance of conflict of interest that might result through the hiring of stringers and leg-people. My motivation is expediency as well as ethics -- we simply do not spend as much time checking into the backgrounds of independent contractors as we do of fulltime staff people."
Blotcher wrote back: "What puzzles me is that this policy seems applied inconsistently; I know of longtime NYT reporters who have engaged in political work in the past . . . Why has an involvement of a decade ago become a disqualifier?"
Edgerley says in an interview that she is making such decisions "on a case-by-case basis" and that it "makes sense" to evaluate whether someone who was a public spokesman has a potential conflict. "This is fundamental, elementary kind of stuff," she says of the review.