Ethics Statement

Welcome to the ethics statement of Predicate, LLC, predicate-llc.com and its principal, Jeffrey MacIntyre.

This entry will serve as a repository for documenting professional standards. It is particularly relevant to someone such as myself who self-identifies both as a journalist and consultant. I also want to ensure that the aggregation of outside links and authors’ stories in my linkblog, “Notes on Content,” is clearly articulated and understood.

Purpose of predicate-llc.com

The purpose of this site is three-fold:

1. To promote the nameplate of Predicate, LLC, my NYC-based consultancy;
2. To raise awareness and advance knowledge of content strategy and its practitioners; and
3. To curate and share what I’ve been reading on and offline via my trade industry linkblog, “Notes on Content.”

My intention with the lattermost is to make clear attributions to my immediate source, the author, publication and date.

Journalistic Ethics

Aside from consulting, I take my professional standing as a freelance journalist very seriously. I draw sharp divisions between my work as a journalist and as a consultant, and uphold the strictest definitions of each. As a journalist I routinely sign contracts that explicitly demarcate my ethical responsibilties and declare existing conflicts of interest. I do not curry favor with or solicit media attention for clients through my own writing.

I will continue in future to embroider this section with details that seem pertinent as matters of disclosure.

Acknowledgement

In the spirit of full disclosure, the remainder of this statement is editorially inspired by Kara Swisher and the statement on her Dow Jones-owned All Things Digital website. In keeping with my nerdcore fancy, I’d like to start a collection of such ethics statements: be sure to send your favorites my way.

“Notes on Content”: The Linkblog

I’ve made every attempt to clearly mark all linkblog entries, many of which quote from the sources to which they link, as the original work of others with some standard legal language.

The aggregation of outside content is an issue of personal and professional interest, since I have experienced being plagiarized and have also consulted with clients, many of them professional journalistic institutions, seeking to make meaningful (and legal) use of content aggregation on the web. As AllThingsD.com has stated in their own disclosure statement for aggregating outside content:

We are fully aware of the controversies around how linking and aggregating is done on the Web and we, in no way, are attempting to “scrape” original content created by others. Instead, regarding third-party posts, we are trying to point readers of this site to other posts from around the Web that we admire and are trying to do so in the quickest manner possible. The Internet is full of terrific content that is not ours and we want to help our readers find it by making editorial suggestions–Look, Mom, no algorithm!–of posts we think are worth their time.

I collect these links for two reasons:

1. One, to catalogue important developments pertinent to my own ongoing client work and intellectual property; and
2. Two, to share noteworthy information and, in my small way, contribute to the knowledge base for content specialists everywhere.

A few remaining details worth summarizing here as statements of principle:

• I only excerpt from larger works or posts;
• 100% of entries are clearly labeled as originating elsewhere, and not to be attributed to Predicate, LLC, predicate-llc.com or myself;
• The original author his or herself is often explicitly mentioned (this is largely determined by site metadata standards);
• I have not removed comments or sharing icons from these entries but will do so on a request basis from their authors or publishers; and
• I make no editing changes to these entries nor do I make any claim to copyright.

If your work is excerpted here, and you wish it removed, please let me know immediately. I will comply and refrain from pointing to any of your work in future.

Feedback

Does this get the job done?

Reach out to let me know how you’d rate the effectiveness and sufficiency of this statement.