The San Francisco Chronicle's food critic has taken a lot of heat because every chef in town knows what he looks like.

How many of you think any of the travel writers who went on the maiden voyage of the QE2 paid their way or that their papers did? I would be surprised if there were any.

Concert reviews also fall into this category. Reviewers receive first- and second-row seats. Now I've seen concerts from the first row and those concerts tend to be far more fantastic than those I've seen from a distance so great I might as well have listened from the parking lot.

Sportswriters get a heck of a lot of stuff, sometimes including travel on the team plane.

A good many newspapers - and not just the little ones - see entertainment, food and travel as just fluff anyway so don't care all that much if they take the free trips, free meals, free concert tickets.

When I was reporting and would cover events with reporters from around the nation, I was blown away by some of the stuff people at some very large papers were allowed to keep. Some of the fashion writers had their wardrobes provided gratis. My paper had a pretty strict policy against freebies, although the trips, movies, concerts, parties (Black & White Ball, etc.) were still considered OK.

Someone wrote on here recently that their paper had a policy against doing stories that could be detrimental to their advertisers. If my paper had instituted that one, it would have been time to walk and I'm pretty certain I would have had a lot of company.