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There was a time when a business breakfast was simply a business breakfast. A man from the insurance office handed his card to a woman from the title company; both smiled as though they had just concluded the Treaty of Versailles, and everybody went home feeling faintly improved. No constitutions were rewritten. No professional boundaries were dissolved. No one emerged from the pancake station believing he had acquired editorial control over a newspaper.
That, at any rate, was the old arrangement.
The modern networking group is a different creature. It is built on friendliness, reciprocity, referral, and the uplifting notion that everybody in the room may be of use to everybody else, provided enough coffee is consumed and enough business cards are exchanged. There is nothing inherently wicked about this. Commerce has always depended in part on acquaintance. Human beings prefer to do business with people whose names they know and whose luncheon habits they have had occasion to observe.
The trouble begins when that spirit migrates into fields where friendliness is no substitute for authority and reciprocity is no substitute for principle.
I was reminded of this recently during an exchange involving a local real estate professional, which is an industry one might reasonably expect to possess at least a passing acquaintance with contracts, authority, and the meaning of a signed document. Apparently, one would be wrong. What should have been a straightforward journalistic interview somehow acquired the air of a negotiated promotional arrangement, complete with assumptions about approval rights and editorial control that existed nowhere except, presumably, in the warm bath of networking etiquette. This is what happens when people who spend their days buying and selling legal obligations begin to imagine that a news story works the same way as a listing agreement. It does not. A newspaper is not a marketing packet, and being written about is not the same thing as hiring the writer.
That, in a nutshell, is the moral hazard.
A moral hazard arises when one party is encouraged to take liberties because he assumes someone else will absorb the consequences. In the world of networking, this often takes a very cheerful form. People begin to suppose that because they know one another, the normal rules have relaxed. A professional courtesy here, a friendly accommodation there, and before long someone is behaving as though a social connection confers powers no one ever granted.
The phrase for this in ordinary English is: things getting out of hand.
Journalism is especially vulnerable to this confusion, because many people like favorable publicity and very few object to seeing their names spelled correctly in public. They begin with the sensible assumption that factual errors should be corrected. Quite right too. Then, with the stealth of a vine creeping up a porch rail, the assumption expands. If one factual correction is proper, why not a structural suggestion? If a quote can be clarified, why not a tone adjusted? If a phrase feels unflattering, why shouldn’t it be removed? By the time this logic has finished its work, an interview subject has quietly promoted herself from source to editor, and the publication is expected to smile gratefully through the transaction.
This is where networking culture does its mischief.
In a networking group, the atmosphere is intentionally warm. That is the point of it. Relationships are built. Referrals are exchanged. Members are urged to think of one another not merely as vendors or professionals, but as trusted allies in a common enterprise. All very nice. But a newspaper is not part of that enterprise. A publication does not exist to pass leads, cultivate goodwill, or help round out this quarter’s sales numbers. Its duty is to its readers. Sometimes that means a business comes off looking quite good, which is pleasant for all concerned. Sometimes it means the business is described in a way the proprietor would not have chosen for herself. That is life in a free society.
What a networking group can do, however, is create a fog around these distinctions. A reporter who belongs to the same circle as a business owner may be assumed to be operating less as a journalist than as a kind of literary ambassador. An interview becomes, in the imagination of the subject, a collaborative exercise. The resulting story is treated not as reporting but as a joint branding venture with punctuation. Once that happens, the possibility of legal confusion is never far behind.
For when people begin acting on assumptions rather than authority, documents get signed that should not be signed. Permissions are implied that were never granted. Rights are imagined that do not exist. One person thinks he is being agreeable. Another thinks she has secured control. A third discovers, too late, that his name or publication has been dragged into an arrangement he never approved and would never have approved.
Then come the apologies, the indignation, and, if enough folly has accumulated, the lawyers.
This is not because networking groups are evil. Most are merely earnest. But earnestness, like mayonnaise, has its limits. Spread it too far and everything becomes soft at the edges. Professions that depend upon independence cannot afford soft edges. Journalism, law, medicine, accounting, public office — these are all fields in which somebody occasionally has to say, “No, that is not how this works,” and go right on saying it even after the room grows chilly.
That is not rudeness. It is professionalism.
In a county like ours, where people know one another, attend the same events, worship in neighboring churches, and occasionally discover they are second cousins through a marriage nobody mentions anymore, these boundaries matter more, not less. Familiarity can be a civic blessing. It can also be a solvent. The closer the community, the stronger the temptation to substitute relationship for rule.
And that is why networking groups, for all their harmless boosterism, can create moral hazards and legal chaos. They encourage people to believe that acquaintance equals authority, that friendliness creates rights, and that institutions exist to serve the ambitions of the people nearest the coffee urn.
They do not.
A newspaper is still a newspaper. A contract is still a contract. And no quantity of cheerful networking should be allowed to confuse the two.
