Oh, and don’t tell anyone till tomorrow, but that’s the last NDA I’ll sign
Last week I signed an NDA (non-disclosure agreement; all these things must be TLAs - three letter acronyms, yes?) so that I could get some more information about something that was happening so I could judge whether it would be worth going along to the press conference.
The NDA contained all sorts of terrifying warnings about how I could be sued for zillions of pounds and so on if I were to breathe a word about what I had discovered.
Waste of time that was. The news came out anyway, through other channels, leaving me wondering whether it was worth the effort of reading through the small print of the NDA to see whether I was now allowed to write it up, or not.
And today, I’ve been asked by another company to go with an NDA for a piece of news that I cut into my day for, to learn something that probably isn’t going to make the paper; and to top it all, this is being asked retrospective to the interview. I’m only not refusing point-blank because I think it would bring many buckets of poo down on the head of the PR person involved, whose fault I don’t really think it is.
But to be honest, I really can’t be bothered with all this. I’ve had it with NDAs. I’ve signed them and then found that they tied my hands over where I could write things; and also that they held me back from writing things that then came out in the public domain anyway, and which I might have found out through doing a bit of journalism, rather than being spoon-fed (from a spoon with a padlock on.. as that’s the best metaphor I can think of). And what’s more is that these days, with the web and blogs and everything else, any piece of news will come out, on time - which means you can reuse it pretty much immediately - or ahead of time. NDAs just don’t serve any useful purpose for me as a journalist any more.
Not saying that this applies to every journalist, but I’ve tried them, and it’s not been a good experience. So in future, I’ll just say No. It may not have worked in the war on drugs, but as I was discussing with James Woudhuysen today, it’s only the Wars on Abstract Nouns (Cancer, Drugs, Terror) that have failed so far. Wars on NDAs should be much simpler.
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December 13th, 2005 at 12:13 am
It is a bit annoying, isn’t it? The one NDA I’ve ever been involved in, I felt silly, as talking about the thing I couldn’t talk about made it seem like some big exciting secret, when it really wasn’t.
I never appreciated free speech until I signed a little bit of it away.
December 13th, 2005 at 3:26 am
Yeah I bought insurance several time, and NEVER USED IT!!!! What a waste of money.
And I signed this loan agreement where they were all scary about how if I defaulted they’d take stuff from me, but it never happened.
And then I signed some other contract with all these clauses, and wow I didn’t even understand a lot of it. Anyway, most of it NEVER EVEN MATTERED!!
The legal system is so stupid! Who cares? Why not just pay for everything with cash, and give up all these social conventions. Then life would be simple.
—
Of course “NDAs just don’t serve any useful purpose for me as a journalist,” since they are designed to protect the the company with which you are entering the contract, from actions you might otherwise take, were you not agreeing to refrain. Duh.
December 13th, 2005 at 1:11 pm
Some journalists have found NDAs useful, because it gets them information ahead of time which they can use to prepare in-depth pieces. But these days, as I said, the tendency is for the information to come out anyway. “Duh” is right enough in retrospect, but not a priori. And in journalism one tends to be working from the latter, not the former.
December 13th, 2005 at 1:38 pm
It’s your right to refuse to sign an NDA. At the appropriate point, when they become too burdensome, PR companies will think twice before using them.
The really interesting thing, though, is what the NDA says about using information that’s public anyway (even if it’s become public after you signed). Any NDA worth its salt will say you can use something that’s public knowledge (otherwise they would be stopping you from saying the sky is blue). But an exception may be something that’s public knowledge only by virtue of someone breaking the NDA. In that case it becomes public knowledge, everyone else is writing about it, and you can’t because you signed their piece of paper.
It would be fun to return to a PR company a signed NDA which has been drawn up by your own company lawyers. But I don’t suppose for a second they’d actually accept that.
December 27th, 2005 at 9:43 pm
I have *long* (10 years?) had a policy of not signing NDAs. Other computer journalists tell me that they sign them because they want acccess to inside information (eg technical stuff about products in development) that they couldn’t get otherwise, but I remain convinced that NDAs do two things, both bad for journalistic integrity: 1) give the company control, however limited, over what you write about; 2) give the illusion that you are important (which is why you’re privy to this stuff).
In that time, of course, NDAs have proliferated — they used to be reserved for situations where they were arguably reasonable (beta product releases) — and as you say they’re now being applied to all sorts of absurd situations.
wg