View / Chips on the table

Have you ever been offered a bribe? I got back from a week off the grid Saturday in time to catch up with The City’s Katie Honan about being offered cash in a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips.

Honan’s adventures with the nickel-and-dime corruption allegedly surrounding New York’s mayor reminded me of the only time I ever got such an offer, in 2005, after I’d nettled the boss of Brooklyn, Vito Lopez, on my blog. He invited me out to lunch at the late lamented Cono’s in Williamsburg, and informed me that he was looking for a “consultant” to help him navigate this new medium. It took me a minute to realize that meant me.

There are countries, and American subcultures, in which cash payments to journalists are common, and sophisticated readers guess at who paid for what. In big American media, the currencies that tempt most journalists are access and information, not cash. (For more on the temptations of access, read Max Tani on Vanity Fair.)

The fragmented new media landscape, however, operates on opaque cash flows and ill-enforced regulations, and awkward arrangements occasionally slip into public in indictments or scandals. I suspect there will be more until there’s a reckoning like the music industry’s payola scandal of the late 1950s.