Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; avoid bidding for news. (Society of Professional Journalists, Code of Ethics)
Chequebook (US checkbook) journalism
Function: noun
Date: 1963
: the practice of paying someone for a news story and especially for granting an interview.
According to Robert Boynton (Checkbook Journalism Revisited: Sometimes We Owe Our Sources Everything, CJR, January / February 2008) in 1963 Esquire paid Muhammad Ali (then Cassius Clay) $150 ($1,000 today) to cooperate with a young journalist named Tom Wolfe for his article, "The Marvelous Mouth," which it published in its October issue.
In November 1970, Esquire published one of the most memorable covers in its history. Illustrating "The Confessions of Lt. Calley," the first of three articles about the man who, with his platoon, murdered hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai, it consisted of a photograph of Calley, in uniform and grinning broadly, surrounded by four adorable Asian children.
"Perhaps one reason for Calley's smile was that Esquire had paid him $20,000 (the equivalent of over $100,000 today) to work with veteran journalist John Sack, who received $10,000 for writing the articles."
