I could use a little new-client speeding right now, though. 🙂

It never fails – the minute I’m facing a slow day and I think maybe I’ll take the laptop and disappear into the local cafe, the work comes flying at me like those monkeys in the Wizard of Oz.

That happens to me all the time. You resign yourself to a slow (read: no income) day, begin to actually look forward to having a day off, and WHAM! the work hits you doing 110 mph on the cyber highway.

See, that’s what I can’t accept – any hint of a false claim, intentional or not. If I alert a client to it and express my concerns and that client brushes those concerns off with something akin to “No one will care and Pacino will never know” that crosses a line. That also shows a client who isn’t above deceitful behavior.

I’d draw the line at fattening given the impending bikini season. 😉

I suppose the Pacino thing could be skirting close to the edge of an illegal/immoral implied endorsement, but I don’t think I would take that hard of a line (“If you decide to do so after you know, I’m not your writer”). Sure it’s dumb, but at the end of the day, if the client wants to mention dining with a celeb — and if I’ve got a contract that protects me and a paper trail of advising against it — I don’t think I’d fire a client over it.

As long as the release doesn’t falsely claim an explicit endorsement, the worst that happens is a cease and desist letter, and I don’t see any actual harm to Mr. Pacino.

Hm… With each caveat, I’m actually becoming more skeptical about my own thesis. I’d be tempted to delete this entire comment, but I don’t want to waste the typing.

Time for bed.

Kimberly, I knew what you meant. 🙂 And she was probably freaking out because she’s a PR person, am I right? They must have insanely high stress levels! They’re basically paid to fret every detail. They do it well, but it becomes an occupational hazard sometimes.

“Example quote(s) from clients about how helpful the blog has been (let’s make up something for now)”

Politely as I could, I declined: “If we can get some quotes, I’ll be happy to revise the press release and add them. But as a journalist, I just can’t bring myself to make up quotes from third parties!”

Oy.

Another request was from a client who fired me last month. The two business partners asked me to research a topic and then write it up without attributing the information to the sources. Twice one of them asked me why we had to attribute information to other people. (At least the other guy said during the call, “They call that plagiarism.” But that didn’t stop the first guy from asking the question again later.)

They fired me because they didn’t like my sources but only after I located sources, ran all the names and an overview of what the sources would say by them, and then interviewed the sources.

It was then that they complained that the sources weren’t good enough. I politely told them it was too late to change course now, and they fired me.

Boy was I glad!