Since I’ve left the journalism world, I’ve had a couple occasions where people whom I helped as part of my job expressed their appreciation with a small gift. While there were no ethical issues in both cases — the gifts were very small and the pepole they came from were in the same organization as me, not some outside vendor or anything that might create a conflict of interest — in both cases my initial thought upon being presented with the gift was, “Is it ok to accept this? Can I decline without hurting their feelings?”

Much of my gift-phobia can be attributed to my experience as a journalist, where I was ethically bound to decline all gifts, no matter how well-intentioned they are.

About a decade ago, while still an intern at the local newspaper, I covered a local high school’s tennis team for most of the season, and it boasted the two best players in the state in its classification, so I followed the team all the way to the state championships, where the two teammates faced each other for the title. During the match, one of the players’ father came up and thanked me for the coverage throughout the year, which, as a journalist, was always nice to hear. Then he said that the two players’ families were going to hold a barbecue sometime soon and wanted to invite me to thank me. By that point in the season, I had gotten to know the family a bit from chatting with them during matches and were on friendly terms with them. So reflexively, I replied, “Ok, thanks.” And with that, we both went back to watching the match.

Almost immediately after those words left my mouth, I started to mentally smack myself for giving such an idiotic response. “Ethics, stupid! Ethics!” Of course, at that point, I felt it would come off as kind of awkward to immediately retract my answer on the grounds of “Oops, I forgot about one of the tenets of journalism for a moment there.” And I didn’t want the father to take it the wrong way since I might need to write more stories about the kids in the future. So I decided that if they did call me later to invite me to the barbecue, I would just come up with some excuse about being busy with work that day and graciously decline.

Thankfully, they never called, but that episode has remained with me, and to this day, whenever someone presents me with a thank-you gift for something I did as part of my job, that momentary lapse oh so many years ago still flashes across my mind.

As for those couple gifts I’ve been offered since leaving journalism, in both instances, after the initial “this feels wrong” instinct, I realized, “Hey, I’m not a journalist anymore,” and I ended up accepting the gifts, albeit still somewhat sheepishly. Hey, I won’t lie: Sometimes it’s nice to be appreciated without having to say, “Thanks, but …” and launch into a lecture about ethics.

Side note

One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about life after journalism is that the people I work to serve actually genuinely appreciate my efforts and say so. As a journalist, I did receive some thank-yous and good-works from readers or people I covered — a thank-you letter from a college track coach whom I wrote a feature about hung on my wall for years because it was such a rare thing. However, such occasional occurrences were overshadowed by the steady amount of “you suck” diatribes and “why don’t you cover my kid since he works so hard to be the backup center on the worst team in the worst conference” whines from faceless people hiding behind a telephone line or an e-mail.

If you want to understand part of the reason many journalists have a level of resentment toward their readers, take that into consideration. It’s not so much that we can’t take criticism. Heck, criticism is part of the job in an environment where everything you do is edited by someone else and put out there for (in my case) tens of thousands of people to judge, and most journalists I’ve worked with generally reacted well to calm, reasonable criticism from readers. But when you work your butt off and forgo sleep, family, friends, and social life to serve a group of people, and basically all they do is kick you constantly and tell you, sometimes in vile, abusive language, how crappy a job you’re doing, you can’t help but feel a level of disdain toward them. Worse still is the fact that no matter how much your readers repay your kindness with scorn, you have to show your appreciation for their patronage while they are hurling insults at you. Sometimes it makes you wish you worked at the Quik Stop in the movie “Clerks”, where you can just rip into the occasional customer to vent your frustrations.