[DigitalSea]

Yes Nicole did, right at the end of her article. As I mentioned in another reply, even sites like Techcrunch who are no strangers to half-baked journalism themselves disclose conflicts of interest at the beginning of their articles. It is misleading in my opinion.

[omonra]

I think you really are looking to say something critical.

As you clearly have nothing substantial to say, your claim 'the disclosure is in the wrong part of the article' is specious.

Let's man up and admit that the whole story that's been pushed over last few days is looking like BS.

[knorby]

And all that she's reporting is her own judgements of the incident and a light confirmation that the conversation took place. She confirms almost every detail that the buzzfeed article states, including the suggestion of targeting Sarah Lacy's personal life.

They built different narratives of the event, largely colored by the biases of each. The journalist had a bias towards building sensation and the friend had a bias towards downplay. If you don't read news articles expecting the bias of a journalist, then I'm sorry, I don't know what you are doing. But until that ending line in the article, she was a well-placed, mostly unbiased, bystander.

[runamok]

As long as she disclosed it at all I have no qualms with the position of said disclosure in the article. Perhaps if it was a 10 page article I would have a problem but it's 6 paragraphs! If a reader's attention span is that short it's their own fault.

[frostmatthew]

> If a reader's attention span is that short it's their own fault.

It's not [necessarily] about attention span. Most people don't have time to read in entirety every single article that they come across.

I'm sure you've skimmed articles, or read just the first paragraph or two and decided it wasn't that interesting (maybe the subject matter was different than what you expected from the headline or maybe the article was poorly written).

In this particular case disclosing a potential conflict of interest at the beginning is important because it's helpful to keep the potential conflict in mind when reading it. Some people may prefer not reading it all because of the conflict of interest so disclosing it early on can save the reader's time. [i.e. I wouldn't bother reading an article on net neutrality written by a friend of Comcast's CEO]

[ephemeralgomi]

Okay, so you've backed down from "You'd think she would have disclosed that" to "I would prefer she prefaced the article with that". I'm content.

[thesteamboat]

I'm going to join the chorus of people who think that her disclosure was clear enough, and that your critique of it seems be a needlessly uncharitable reading and/or mean-spirited.