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Abrams: 650 so far have drunk the Kool-Aid

By Mark Obbie

Dan Abrams -- the NBC legal journalist scheming to hire out working or unemployed journalists as corporate consultants -- tells the Observer's Felix Gillette that in the first five days, he lured 650 journalists to his little honey pot. Gillette describes the early birds as "freelance journalists, people who are writing books and individuals who have recently been laid off or walked away from jobs in the media industry." Abrams defends his consultancy's business model as welfare for a wounded profession:How touching. I have no beef with a former journalist, or someone taking a hard break from journalism, sucking at the corporate teat. The obvious problem is that this is attracting hundreds -- Abrams says he hopes eventually to have 20,000 in his database of experts -- who will now straddle the line between journalism and PR, probably without bothering to inform their readers and viewers. It's not surprising that in these times, desperate people will do desperate things. That just makes this scandal that much sadder -- the Jonestown massacre of journalism ethics, a wholesale compromise of journalists' independence. Choose your poison, folks: You're either with a crippled business, or you're consulting with other sorts of businesses, but you can't do both.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on November 26, 2008 (boomark / email).