Recently I published this: Statement of Personal Ethics, Potential Biases, and Possible Conflicts of Interest in order to explicitly state— for me and anyone interested in interacting with me— who I am. What moves me, where I’m coming from, how I get my money. Who I am in league with, and why. All of these things are critical in evaluating what I say. If you want to parse my trut, you have to know my starting points. That’s why I wrote them down.
My guide in this was Kara Swisher, co-founder of the technology news Web site All Things D. Her ethics statement is a plain-language guide to who she is. It’s very personal, talking about her marriage, and also brass-tacks, where she discloses her financial interest. Kara breaks huge technology news on deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but it occurred to me that it would be useful if everyone had a statement of this kind. So I wrote my own.