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| Volume 50, Number 4, Fall 2001 |
THE FREE LANCEby Tabitha M. Powledge What NASW Did Last SummerVacationing on Mars, were you? Then you will have missed the Great Ad Ruction, which so enlivened August for the rest of us. This event's most visible manifestation was an extended, fierce, voluminous conflict that captured the general NASW listserv, nasw-talk. If you missed it, read all about it in the listserv archives. Our story begins with this ad, which appeared on the NASW Jobs listserv Aug. 9:
The ad is singularly forthright about a specific type of freelance work that makes most of us squirm. An agency pays a writer to attend a medical meeting. Ostensibly the writer covers scientific sessions and reports on them for the medical press in a disinterested, journalistic way. But the sessions covered are those where the agency's client's products-usually drugs or medical devices-are touted, and the reports are unfailingly gushing. Moreover, the articles are almost always presented to editors and readers alike with no indication that they are really paid advertisements (indeed, twice-paid, since the publication also pays the writer). They are, in short, press releases tricked out as journalism. These practices dismay journalists and public relations folks alike, because they further tarnish two professions that struggle with image problems even on good days. No one knows how frequently the assignments happen, but the ploy must succeed some significant percentage of the time because writers continue to be offered the work. Some are NASW members who sign on because the assignments are lucrative and include subsidized travel to places that can be even nicer than Scotland. Most members don't do this work-indeed, won't do it. Like several hundred other NASW members, I subscribe to the indispensable nasw-jobs listserv. But I was on vacation, blissfully e-mail deprived, and didn't see the Aug. 9 posting until my return. The ad appalled me and, on Aug. 14, I brought it to the attention of my fellow NASW board members as a policy question. A board e-mail debate was still going on when, on Aug. 22, Andrew Skolnick posted a message to nasw-talk decrying the ad. His message provoked several hundred replies. In many years of reading NASW e-mail discussions, I've never seen a topic engender so many messages, nor have I seen responses so savage and personal. Amid predictable fission into several subtopics, there were two main threads. One debated whether the jobs were or could be ethical and whether it mattered. As you will have gathered, for me those assignments are not acceptable. Among other wrongs, they require deceiving readers intentionally. If you want to know the arguments on the other side, consult the nasw-talk listserv archives. The second main topic centered around whether NASW should support these assignments by accepting ads for them. On both the board and the talk listservs, several people argued that members could judge these things for themselves and didn't need shielding from the naughty world. Let's call this the "we are not your mother" argument because others did. I couldn't agree more, and you probably couldn't either. But this mother is a straw man. No one ever contended that NASW shouldn't accept the ads because Little Red Writing Heads must be protected against the Big Bad Pharma. A more pertinent argument in favor of permitting the ads is the economic one. Shouldn't NASW be trying to broaden financial opportunities for members? Especially freelances, who have long constituted a significant percentage of NASW membership but who have become a voluble-and valued-constituency in the organization only recently? Especially in tough economic times? No matter what? Fortunately, that's not the choice posed by The Ad and others like it. Because there aren't any others like it. On Aug. 23, Bob Finn explained why. Bob, it turns out, is not only NASW's indispensable cybrarian but also the keeper of the nasw-jobs listserv. He told the board and the nasw-talk listservs: Ads such as this have come to me a handful of times in the past five years. Each time, before posting the ad, I have sent a note to the advertiser asking them if they were aware of the ethical questions surrounding the practice they were proposing to engage in. I tell the advertiser that I can't distribute the ad as is. In the case of this ad I would have additionally pointed out that it was unlikely that anyone could 'guarantee' placement, and that in any case whomever they hired would be ethically bound to disclose their arrangement with any publication. Usually what happens is that the advertiser says he or she had no idea that this practice was unethical, and they withdraw the ad. In any case, I do not believe I have run another ad like this in the years I've been responsible for the nasw-jobs mailing list. So how did this one sneak through the net? By accident. Bob had the cheek to go on vacation. And is vetting the ads a time-consuming, burdensome chore? Nope. "In the entire time I've been running the job board (since the summer of '96) there have been at most a handful of ethically questionable ads," Bob told me in a separate e-mail. Therefore, the economic argument is a straw man too. There will be next to no impact on members' Schedules C if NASW continues to do what it has been doing for years: not run ads for assignments that require a writer to lie. For Prez Paul Raeburn's thoughts about this topic, see his column (page 19). But I suspect that the polemics on the nasw-talk listserv waxed so brutal and personal in part because this has really been an argument about whether NASW should stand for something. That's a long-time tension for us. We don't talk about it much because it's such a bog, but we have not seen the last of it. Does being @nasw.org confer a bit of professionalism? Or is it all about networking-and the fabulous parties? Seems to me it's in all our interests-our naked, unabashed, capitalist interests-if belonging to NASW implies a certain competence and, yes, even trustworthiness. This is not a plea for a formal code of ethics. Organizational codes are notoriously empty and ineffective, and in any case we're too polyglot-and too crabby-to agree on much of anything. But surely we can agree that deliberate lying in our work should be out of bounds. That seems like a pretty uncontroversial, even minimal, principle to me. In fact, as a banner to rally 'round, it's kind of pathetic. "Hire us! We don't tell deliberate lies!" But it's a start. You Could Look It UpWriting about some cell biology arcana a few weeks ago, I had an urgent need to look up a slew of unfamiliar terms. So I tried out xrefer, which bills itself as the Web's reference engine ("Free access to over 50 reference titles containing more than 500,000 entries"). Swell. It failed me only once out of a dozen or so examples of truly obscure technical jargon. With one exception (discussed below), this is now my favorite online lookup service. It's clean looking, easy to use, and very fast (http://www.xrefer.com/). This experience prompted a dictionary hunt, a category of search engines I hadn't looked at for a time. As a result, my co-favorite dictionary site is now OneLook Dictionaries ("Dictionary word count = 3,919,357 words in 740 online dictionaries now indexed"). OneLook managed to come up with several possibilities for "integrin," the word that stumped xrefer. It offered the plural, as well as several compound terms that contained integrin. From which I infer that OneLook does a pretty good job with fuzzy searching. It also offers definitions in many languages besides English, which I didn't try. It, too, is uncluttered, simple and fast (http://www.onelook.com/). I checked out several other dictionary sites, but they were all so much less useful than OneLook and xrefer that there's no point in providing the URLs. Clunkier, slower, and harder to use, often sending me through several screens before confessing that my word could not be found. Stick with OneLook and xrefer. The National Library of Medicine's new-ish MedlinePlus service has a page of links to medical dictionaries and other reference books. I haven't pored through them, but given the venue, they're likely to be mostly reliable and reasonably current. Convenience may be another matter (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/dictionaries.html). Since it went online last year, I have hungered for the Oxford English Dictionary. "The complete contents of the 20-volume second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The complete contents of the three additions volumes published 1993-7 PLUS Quarterly releases of work in progress from the massive revision of the OED-material not available in any other form." Yum, yum. Except that my stomach turns when I contemplate the price:
$550. Per year. Not likely to become a standard reference work for freelance
writers, even though we could sure use the help-and the matchless opportunities
that OED-browsing offers for Writing Avoidance. My QPC membership lapsed some time ago owing to the fact that I didn't buy any books. But I'm signing up again. # Tabitha M. Powledge can be reached via e-mail at tam@nasw.org. |