Get your computer fixed for free and get paid to write an article about it for the New York Times? We can't think of a better way to multi-task. Not to mention multi-earn.

That's what Times columnist David Pogue (also a contributor to CBS News and National Public Radio) was thinking when he was "comped" $2,000 in charges from DriveSavers, a "personal-data-recovery service" for his review for the Times. And CBS. And NPR.

The case of Pogue, and the DriveSavers pieces he did for the New York Times, CBS News, and NPR, seems to suggest that for all the ballyhoo these days about journalistic ethics, standards, and practices, overseers at the zenith of the U.S. news business allowed at least one journalist and his editors to believe those standards don't apply to them.

So, not only is he getting free stuff, but he's selling the same story to competing news outlets? Doesn't this break, like, almost every rule of being a journalist? Pretty shocking.

Even more shocking, however, was the Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty's claim that the paper's restaurant critics "always pay for their meals."

We were under the distinct impression that the Babbo receipts end up in monthly expense reports, and Arthur Sulzberger Jr. surely winds up paying for them.

The Free Press [Matt Smith, Los Angeles Weekly]