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You don't make clear whether they intend to pay you for these "reviews."
If you receive compensation for them, then you are simply *not* an
independent reviewer and to claim your reviews were independent would be
unethical -- even fraudulent, no matter how hard you tried to be
unbiased. You must not only *be* ethical, you must *appear* to be so.
If you write reviews for no money (from them, at least) then there's no
problem that I can see.
HTH,
Stuart Rogers
Technical Communicator
Phoenix Geophysics Limited
Toronto, ON, Canada
+1 (416) 491-7340 x 325
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-----Original Message-----
From: bounce-techwr-l-88731 -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
[mailto:bounce-techwr-l-88731 -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com] On Behalf Of Bruce
Byfield
Sent: July 11, 2002 4:34 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: An ethical question
I'm curious what list members think about a situation that has arisen
this week:
Besides doing marcom and technical writing, I also do some computer
journalism. This week, a PR person contacted me about "collaborating"
with a company. At first, the comments suggested that the intent was to
produce some marketing collateral. However, further e-mails made clear
that the point was to cooperate in writing reviews about the company's
products.
I replied that any reviews would be completely independent, and would
need to be based on personal testing. The reply suggests that this is
fine.However, I'm still uneasy.
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