The case against financial involvement News organizations should not use their checkbooks to show their community involvement. Limit boosterism to the editorial pages.
Some news organizations own pieces of downtown hotels, some help restore historical sites.
Others revitalize areas near the newspaper offices or finance convention centers. It's all part of being good corporate citizens, some publishers say. This notion of corporate responsibility may please civic boosters, but when news organizations start handing over money to create the kind of community they want to see, they also create conflicts of interest and barriers which interfere with their reporters' ability to do their jobs. No matter how carefully guidelines are engineered to protect the reporting staff from influence, they can't change the inherent conflict. Any guidelines to protect the reporter who's covering the company just underscore the fact that this story is treated differently.