When John Biggs of Michael Arrington's Techcrunch publishing group traveled to Seoul on a trip paid for by a Korean consumer electronics company, he was excruciatingly open about the arrangement. "I'm here with Samsung, suckling on the sweet teat of junket whoredom," wrote the freelancer, a former blogger with Gawker's Gizmodo. But what's par for the course at Techcrunch, the leading Valley news site, is not necessarily so by the prissy standards of old media. This is rich in irony. The New York Times, so often slammed as unethical by Arrington, has published an investigation into two stories it published about Samsung cellphones by the same freelancer. The newspaper's public editor, recommending a tightening of rules for freelancers, writes:

The freelancer who took the Samsung junket, John Biggs, had responded to the online ethics questionnaire for outside contributors in May, shortly after it became a requirement. "Have you accepted any free trips, junkets or press trips in the last two years?" one question asked. His negative response was accurate at that time, according to Mr. Whitney, who is also the paper's standards editor. After taking the October junket, primarily to write for CrunchGear.com, a blog about electronic gear, Mr. Biggs told me, he "simply forgot" about updating his ethics questionnaire response so Times editors would be aware of his conflict of interest and not assign him any Samsung stories. His editor doesn't share his vague recollection that he mentioned Samsung's role in his trip. [Spotting Freelancer Conflicts, by Byron Calame].

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