Recently Freelance Switch featured a post on nurturing relationships with your best clients. It includes some great advice on staying in touch and going that extra mile. But when I read the part about turning a press release into a pitch for a feature article, I stopped cold. Sure, I'd be popular with my copywriting clients if I did this from time to time. But I doubt my editors would appreciate it. In fact, many of them would consider this a conflict of interest, even if I wasn't getting paid by my client to write or pitch the article.
What do you think?
Lots of freelance journalists keep their hands out of corporate coffers to avoid a potential bias, but not everyone can afford to do that. The money I earn from press releases, ghostblogging, product descriptions, and other miscellaneous copywriting projects allows me to take on less more lucrative (and more interesting) creative projects. I try to reconcile the two by declining requests from clients to get them free press, unless I'm completely transparent with the editor.
If I felt comfortable (and truly believed it was a great story), I might say to an editor: "this is someone who's hired me to do copywriting, so I understand if you want to assign this to someone else. But I think it'd make a great story." I would only do this an editor I know very well. Otherwise the relationship could haunt me later and undermine my editorial relationship. I know other freelancers who refuse to write in the same industries. So if they do copywriting for a hospital, they wouldn't write a feature article on the healthcare industry.
It's a sticky situation, and I'd be interested in hearing how others handle it. I'm also curious if freelancers in other industries (say graphic designers or translators) have similar ethical issues to deal with. Any thoughts?